LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap... Copyright No... 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 



THE GOSPEL 



OF 



THE DIVINE SACRIFICE 



Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace 

Book of Job 



THE GOSPEL 



OF THE 



DIVINE SACRIFICE 

<3 StutJg in IB&aitgeltcal Beltrf 

WITH SOME CONCLUSIONS TOUCHING LIFE 



BY 

CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL, D.D. 

MINISTER OF THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN 
NEW YORK 



* 



NEW YORK 



DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
1896 



-$&*& 
&* 



Copyright, 1896, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



TO 

&fje iffiletnorg of iTOg JFatfjer 

A THOUGHTFUL BELIEVER IN THE SAVIOUR, WHOM HE 
NOW BEHOLDS 

THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED 

WITH FILIAL APPRECIATION, GRATITUDE, AND 
AFFECTION 



CONTENTS 



Chapter Page 

I. The Atonement not the Cause of 
God's Love, but Love the Cause 

of the Atonement 3 

II. The Extent of the Atonement; or, 

For Whom did Christ Die? . . 29 

III. Why not Forgiveness without Sac- 

rifice? 57 

IV. The Sorrow of Christ in His Sac- 

rifice 87 

V. The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 119 
VI. The Rejection of the Atonement 149 
VII. The Problem of Human Suffering 
considered in the light of the 

Divine Sacrifice 179 

VIII. The Sovereignty of God 209 

IX. The Application of the Sacrifice 
of Christ to the Present Con- 
dition of Society 237 



Contents 

Chapter Page 

X. The New Testament Idea of Human 

Personality 267 

XI. Conduct ; or, The Crowning of 

Oneself 293 



vm 



Introductory Note 

The following pages represent the attempt 
of an individual to state for himself the 
meaning of the Divine Sacrifice. The his- 
toric Confessions of the Protestant Church 
are not meant to deter the individual from 
making his own studies in New Testament 
truth. They are meant rather to stimu- 
late inquiry, and to encourage first-hand 
use of the Scriptures. True reverence for 
those Confessions, and grateful apprecia- 
tion of their value, may coexist with hum- 
ble efforts to think out for oneself " the 
mystery which hath been hid from ages 
and from generations, but now is made 
manifest. ,, 

The writer disclaims all controversial 
intent in that which he has written. His 
aim has been to state, in terms of modern 
thought, " the glorious Gospel of the 

Blessed God ; " to emphasize the bearing 

ix 



Introductory Note 

of the Atonement upon personality and 
upon conduct; to commend the Evangeli- 
cal position to some thoughtful men and 
women who may have experienced diffi- 
culty in appropriating the supreme mes- 
sage of Christianity. The joy of life and 
the dignity of conduct are bound up in 
that supreme message of Christianity. 
There is, therefore, a place for any word, 
however crudely spoken, that may make 
Christ and His Sacrifice more intelligible 
to a human soul. 

This book rests on three assumptions : 
The Authenticity of the Scriptures, the 
Inspiration of the Scriptures, the Godhead 
of Christ. These assumptions are logical 
in the premises. The writer could, if re- 
quired, state the processes through which 
he has reached for himself thorough con- 
victions of the Authenticity and Inspira- 
tion of the Holy Scriptures and of the 
Godhead of Jesus Christ. But this would 
be to extend the contents of the present 
work beyond proper limits. It is not 
necessary. The ultimate evidential test of 
the message of Christianity is in itself. 

x 



Introductory Note 

The Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice is its 
own Apologia. In the breadth of its con- 
ception of God ; in the axiomatic truth of 
its delineation of man ; in the seraphic 
purity of its principles ; in the regal majesty 
of its commandments; in the idyllic ten- 
derness of its consolations, — the Gospel 
of the Cross demonstrates itself, to whom- 
soever will receive it, as the wisdom of 
God and the power of God unto salvation. 

SlNTON, WESTPORT, 

August, A.D. 1896. 



XI 



I 



THE ATONEMENT NOT THE CAUSE 

OF GOD'S LOVE, BUT LOVE THE 

CAUSE OF THE ATONEMENT 



We have seen and do testify, that the Father sent 
the Son to be the Saviour of the world. 

First Epistle of St. John. 

But God commendeth His own love toward us, 
in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for 
us. Much more then, being now justified by His 
blood, shall we be saved from the wrath of God 
through Him. 

Epistle to the Romans. 



Chapter I 

The Atonement not the Cause of 
God's Love, but Love the Cause 
of the Atonement 

Christianity is the Gospel of the 
Divine Sacrifice. Christianity de- 
rives its name from Christ, its mean- 
ing from the Cross. Reduced to its 
simplest terms Christianity gives 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 
This, the essence of Christianity, 
forms the subject of the following 
pages. The conditions of our time 
invite the study of this subject. Our 
time is a crowded, pushing, keen- 
witted time; there are many gospels, 
— gospels of ambition, gospels of self- 
ishness, gospels of progress, gospels 
of worldly and churchly pride. It is 
a time of all times to consider the 

3 



The Atonement 

Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice. The 
conditions of our lives invite the 
study of this subject. Those who 
are trained to think for themselves, 
not to do their thinking by proxy, 
are also tempted to think too little 
about Jesus Christ and Him cruci- 
fied. It becomes easier to accept 
the forms of Christianity than to 
realize its essence ; that which is 
spiritual tends to sink into that 
which is habitual ; the vision of 
God to fade into the light of com- 
mon day. The glory of God calls 
for the study of this subject. u God, 
Who at sundry times and in divers 
manners spake in time past unto 
the fathers by the prophets, hath 
in these last days spoken unto us by 
His Son." The Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice is God's message by His 
Son. Christ is the Word, — the 
Message Incarnate, — Him we must 
hear. " See," said one of old, " that 
ye refuse not Him That speaketh. 

4 



The Atonement 

For if they escaped not, when they 
refused Him That warned them on 
earth, much more shall not we escape 
who turn away from Him Thatwarn- 
eth from heaven : Whose voice then 
shook the earth : but now hath He 
promised, saying : Yet once more 
will I make to tremble, not the earth 
only, but also the heaven." 

The present observations on this 
subject proceed from an attempt 
(begun long since in the writer's own 
private studies of the Word, and for 
the sake of satisfying the hunger of 
his own heart, and continued in the 
larger hope of helping others), to find 
a starting-point from which to think 
one's way into the Gospel of the 
Divine Sacrifice ; into the truth 
" Jesus Christ and Him crucified;" 
into the essence of Christianity. The 
result of this attempt has been the 
evolution of a formula : The Atone- 
ment not the cause of God's Love, 
but Love the cause of the Atone- 

5 



The Atonement 

ment. This formula furnishes a 
convenient starting-point from which 
to begin to think one's way into the 
problem of "Jesus Christ and Him 
crucified." There must be a starting- 
point from which the human mind 
shall begin its study of the Divine 
Sacrifice. Intellectually, a starting- 
point is a necessity. The proposition, 
" Jesus Christ and Him crucified " 
is too great to be taken up as an 
incident, a detached event, to be 
considered by itself. There must be 
something back of it, something prior 
to it, some antecedent fact of some 
kind, of which fact " Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified " is the result. The 
question then is : What is that 
antecedent fact upon which the mind 
may rest, and from which the mind 
may begin, as from a starting-point, 
to work its way up to the supreme 
consummation, which is the Divine 
Sacrifice ? Spiritually, a starting- 
point is a necessity. If the Holy 

6 



The Atonement 

Spirit reveals to us a Saviour Whom 
we are to worship, He must, in order 
that we may worship Him intelli- 
gently, also reveal the cause of which 
the Saviours work is the result. 
Faith requires a starting-point from 
which to pursue its course, a funda- 
mental idea on which to build, an 
underlying ultimate cause, in which, 
as in the socket of Calvary's rock, 
to plant the Cross. Deny this to 
faith, and faith in Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified becomes a vag;ue and 
fitful conception, floating about a 
cross which is rather a figure of 
speech than a fixed and unalterable 
reality. The soul hungers to find 
that starting-point. It cannot take 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified as 
an incident, an after-thought, an he- 
roic rescue devised in an emergency. 
It feels instinctively that the Cross 
must be the result of some deeper 
cause. It demands to be led to that 
deeper cause, that it may make it the 

7 



The Atonement 

starting-point of thought. Such a 
starting-point is provided in the for- 
mula : The Atonement not the 
cause of God's Love, but Love the 
cause of the Atonement. In defin- 
ing this formula it becomes necessary 
to state the assumptions on which it 
rests. They are three in number : 
the authenticity of the Scriptures, 
the inspiration of the Scriptures, the 
Godhead of Christ. It is not essen- 
tial, for our present purpose, to sketch 
even in outline the process of thought 
by which an unprejudiced mind may 
be satisfied of the authenticity of the 
Scriptures, of the inspiration of the 
Scriptures, and of the Godhead of 
Jesus Christ; it is sufficient to an- 
nounce that these three propositions 
are assumed as the basis of all that 
may hereafter be said. 

It will be observed that the formula 
contains two declarations, — one neg- 
ative, one positive. 

I. The negative declaration: The 
8 



The Atonement 

Atonement is not the cause of God's 
Love. When one who desires a 
settled faith in the Atonement, and 
who feels that the Death of Christ 
must be more than a mere tragic in- 
cident in history, begins to search 
for that ultimate idea which lies be- 
neath the Atonement, and which 
explain^ it, he may think he has found 
it in the idea of a loving Saviour in- 
terposing to shield guilty sinners 
from an angry God. As he turns 
the pages of his Bible, his eyes fall 
on many passages which speak of the 
wrath of God, and of the punishment 
of sin ; and then in melting contrast 
to those fearful passages breathing of 
judgment, the face of Christ shines 
upon him from the same Bible, — 
the face of the Man of Sorrows, pale 
with fatigue, seamed with grief, 
scarred with the wounds from a 
thorny crown, marvellous in pity, 
compassion, willingness to suffer. 
As these two opposite ideas meet him 

9 



The Atonement 

again and again in his study of the 
Bible, — the wrath of God, the ten- 
derness and self-sacrifice of Jesus, • — 
he feels the force of the contrast be- 
tween them working out a practical 
result in his own thought. God is 
contrasted with Christ. God the 
stern and terrible punisher of sin ; 
Christ the meek and gentle lamb ; 
Christ the voluntary offering, placing 
himself between the terrible wrath of 
God and the defenceless head of man, 
and receiving upon Himself the storm 
of wrath. And as his thought crys- 
tallizes around these two contrasted 
ideas, he conceives of God as a Being 
Whose wrath has been appeased by 
the Atonement, Who loves us because 
Christ has died for us ; and thus the 
ultimate idea lying back of the Atone- 
ment appears to be that the Atone- 
ment is the cause of God's love. 
Christ is thus represented to the 
mind as having in His love and com- 
passion stepped between man and 

IO 



The Atonement 

God to make God feel differently 
toward man, to make Him love man, 
Who but far Christ would not have 
loved man. It is easy for any one 
familiar with the New Testament to 
see how this contrast between the 
wrath of God and the love of Christ, 
or, to speak more exactly, this con- 
trast between God and Christ can be 
supported by texts of Scripture, and 
nothing could be farther from the 
writers purpose than to criticise or 
to condemn the opinions of those who 
are persuaded that this is the deepest 
idea beneath the Atonement : that 
the Atonement is the cause of God's 
love, that God loves man because of 
the Atonement, because Christ died. 
But as one studies the effects of this 
view in the spiritual life of people, 
one sees certain things which suggest 
the thought that this may not be the 
ultimate idea which underlies the 
great truth of Jesus Christ and Him 

crucified. For the effect of this view 

ii 



The Atonement 

seems to be the introduction of dis- 
cord into the Holy Trinity, setting 
the Father against the Son, and the 
Son against the Father in Their re- 
spective attitudes toward man. The 
Father is stern and wrathful ; the Son 
is tender and pitiful ; the Father has 
lifted His hand to strike and destroy ; 
the Son, moved by a holy passion to 
save, has flung Himself into the very 
path of descending judgment, to re- 
ceive its shock upon His own Person. 
Can this be our deepest and best 
thought of God ? Can this thought 
lead us as far as we may be led into 
the conception of the perfect unity of 
life and purpose which exists in the 
Triune Godhead ? Moreover, as one 
traces the results of this proposition, 
that the love of God is caused by 
Christ's Atonement, as these results 
work themselves out in many of the 
lives brought in contact with the idea, 
one feels that in reaching this idea 
we have not gone so far as we may 

12 



The Atonement 

go to find a starting-point for our 
thought of the Atonement For one 
encounters two opposite results which 
apparently develop from the proposi- 
tion that the Atonement is the cause 
of love. One result is a form of cling- 
ing to Christ which practically sepa- 
rates Him from God. We find one 
trusting, loving, clinging to, confiding 
in Jesus as a shelter from God ; much 
as a child runs to its mother and 
buries its face in her arms to shut out 
from view some gloomy figure that 
has terrified it. The other result is 
substantially the rejection of the 
Atonement as something unworthy 
of God ; the setting aside of Jesus as 
Mediator, from the feeling that God 
is too great, too noble, too good to 
demand the blood of an innocent 
victim such as Christ was, before He 
will be induced to love man. There 
are those who deny the Atonement 
out of respect for God ; they feel un- 
willing to attribute to God a nature 

J 3 



The Atonement 

so revengeful that He will not love 
man until He has seen His own Son 
stretched in deadly anguish and ig- 
nominy on the Cross. 

II. Observing for years these results 
working themselves out respectively 
in various classes of minds (while, 
one is also bound to say, many others 
seem to experience no difficulty in 
holding that the Atonement is the 
cause of God's love), it has appeared 
to the writer possible to reach some 
still deeper basis of thought where 
one might establish a starting-point 
whence to think one's w r ay on to 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 
And in this formula, the positive 
proposition of which is now pre- 
sented, that deeper basis of thought 
is humbly suggested. It is this : 
The Atonement not the cause of 
God's Love, but Love the cause of 
the Atonement. Not this : God 
loves us because Christ died for us ; 
but this : Because God loves us 

14 



The Atonement 

Christ died for us. Love the cause 
of the Atonement. " We have seen 
and do testify, that the Father sent 
the Son to be the Saviour of the 
world." " God commendeth His own 
love toward us, in that while we were 
yet sinners, Christ died for us." 

As one takes the Bible into ones 
hand, and with an open mind and a 
prayerful spirit brings together all 
the material in it bearing upon the 
formula now before us ; doing this 
in absolute honesty, neither sup- 
pressing any fact in the interest of a 
theory, nor buttressing any precon- 
ceived opinion by . an artful use of 
Scripture, — four thoughts present 
themselves, and form in their rela- 
tion to one another a starting-point 
from which to think our way up to 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified: 
The Unity of God. What Man is 
to God. What Sin is to God. What 
Atonement is to God. 

i. The Unity of God. Not alone 
r 5 



The Atonement 

on the quotation of simple and 
separate texts rests this most fun- 
damental conception of our reli- 
gion. It is involved philosophically 
and ethically in the Christian con- 
cept of God. There is One God, 
and if in His mysterious love He 
reveals Himself to us as Three in 
One, the very terms of that re- 
velation preclude the thought of 
conflicting purpose or contrasted 
feelings in the life of the Godhead. 
The thought of the Father hating 
while the Son is loving; of the Fa- 
ther destroying while the Son is 
saving, becomes unthinkable when 
we stand within the precinct of the 
Word. Explicitly have we been told 
of that eternal Unity. Christ de- 
clared it : " The Comforter will not 
speak from Himself, but what He 
shall hear, that shall He speak." 
" The Son can do nothing of Him- 
self, but what He seeth the Father 
do." " The Father is glorified in the 

16 



The Atonement 

Son." If we behold in the Father 
holy wrath against sin, we may know 
that the Son, gentle and gracious 
though He be, shares in all its ful- 
ness that passion of holy wrath. If 
we behold in the Son tenderness and 
grace, the spirit of self-giving for the 
sake of man, we may know, what- 
ever else we seem to see in God, that 
that marvellous, sacrificial love for 
humanity is also in the heart of the 
Father. " He that hath seen me," 
said Christ, " hath seen the Father." 

2. What Man is to God. Be- 
cause we have in the Bible declara- 
tions of the wrath of God, and 
demonstrations of the judgment of 
God, some have concluded that the 
attitude of Gods heart toward man 
is that of revengeful passion, which 
has simply been appeased by the 
shedding of Christ's blood ; and that 
the love which is now predicated of 
God is not a love for us, so to speak, 
in our own right, but a love for 

2 jj 



The Atonement 

Christ the Son, the benefit of which 
only indirectly comes to us. But 
not to this conclusion is one neces- 
sarily led in ones study of God as 
related to man. If any one would 
know what man is to God, let him 
study that relationship as it appeared 
before sin entered the world to darken 
the scene ; let him look upon man as 
he stood before God in the simplicity 
of an unfallen state, beautiful, stain- 
less, glorious, a child worthy of his 
Father. And what then was man to 
God in the unfallen state ? He was 
God's child, and God was his Father, 
and God's delight was in him, and 
God's hopes were centered upon him, 
and God's world was given him for 
a home, and God's banner over him 
was love. What man was to God 
then, when he had not sinned, but 
when God knew that man's personal 
freedom made it possible for him to 
sin, that man is to God to-day, when 
he has sinned, and come short of the 

18 



The Atonement 

glory of God, and has brought down 
on him the wrath of God, and done 
things worthy of death Man was 
dear to God then in the sinless state. 
He is dear to God now in that sinful 
state which inevitably exposes him 
to the wrath of holiness. Man has 
changed ; God has not changed. 
God loved him then, God loves him 
now. God was his Father then, 
God is his Father now. The calm 
study of the Scriptures appears to 
justify not only, but to require, a 
belief in the Fatherhood of God 
toward all men, — the saintliest and 
the most devil-possessed. This is 
the thought from which some shrink 
because of the rash conclusion which 
has been drawn from it. The Father- 
hood of God is sometimes repre- 
sented as in itself an all-sufficient 
relationship, which renders the Atone- 
ment unnecessary, and which sinks 
the penal consequences of sin in an 
unfathomable ocean of Divine be- 

19 



The Atonement 

nevolence. Men rashly talk of the 
Fatherhood of God as if it were a 
universal indulgence, a license to sin. 
And for this reason some with much 
cause shrink from using the term 
lest it be made a snare. But it is 
not necessary, it is not practicable, 
to surrender a term which, however 
it may have been perverted, contains 
the essential thought of Christianity, 

— that man is dear to God, that God 
loves man as the offspring of His 
own life ; and that all that has been 
done for man's redemption springs 
from the eternal love in the heart of 
God which would not let man go into 
self-destruction without placing an 
Atonement within his reach. 

3. What Sin is to God. It is 
in realizing this that we have most 
signally failed, and in failing here 
we have failed to realize the true 
intensity of those blended passions 

— the passion of wrath and the pas- 
sion of love — that meet in the 

20 



The Atonement 

Atonement. Who can realize what 
sin is to God : how horrible an of- 
fence to His nature ; how gross an 
intrusion upon the order of His 
universe; how intolerable a condi- 
tion which must be beaten down and 
stamped out with the vengeance of 
righteousness ? They who suppose 
that wrath against sin is incom- 
patible with Gods Fatherhood show 
by that supposition that they have 
failed to grasp the essential condi- 
tions of life as they exist in a holy Be- 
ing. We have not understood what 
God is until we are able to speak of 
the wrath of holy love against sin. 
If God is love, and God is holy, the 
wrath of holy love, august, terrible, 
pure, is the necessary condition of 
such a Being in the presence of sin. 
There is a wrath known on earth 
which is born of sinfulness, and is 
filled with hatred. Such wrath is of 
the devil, a hellish passion. But the 
wrath of God is the wrath of holy love, 

21 



The Atonement 

the protest of God's truth and beauty 
and purity and love against that 
which, by disorganizing the universe, 
obstructs His purpose of eternal 
affection toward a race made in 
His own Image, born out of His 
own life. Ah, what is sin to God ! 
If we in moments of pure and 
noble thought have suddenly been 
stricken by it, and have felt the just 
wrath of righteousness rising up 
within us, what must be the wrath 
of God against the sin cherished in 
human lives ; pursued and followed 
after by human passions; wrought 
out to the foul and bitter end in 
human histories! 

4. What, then, is the Atone- 
ment to God? Ask that question 
in the light of these preceding 
thoughts, — what man is to God, and 
what sin is to God. Man is the 
dear object of God's love ; sin is 
the intolerable outrage against God's 
nature, filling God's universe with 

22 



The Atonement 

lawlessness and misery. Atonement 
is the supreme effort of God's love, 
by His own suffering to save man 
from that sin which makes him an 
object of Gods wrath. Put side by 
side these two Scriptures : " The 
wrath of God is revealed from 
heaven against all ungodliness and 
unrighteousness of men," — that is 
the essential attitude of God's holi- 
ness towards sin ; — " But God com- 
mendeth His own love toward us, 
in that, while we were yet sinners, 
Christ died for us ; much more then, 
being now justified by His blood, we 
shall be saved from the wrath of God 
through Him." 

We return, then, to the formula, 
believing it to express the spirit 
of the Scriptures : The Atonement 
not the cause of God's Love, but 
Love the cause of the Atonement. 
The Atonement is the expression on 
earth of a love that filled God's heart 
from the beginning. The Atone- 

23 



The Atonement 

ment is God s self-giving to save us 
from the holy wrath under which 
our sins have brought us. The love 
of the holy God is the starting-point 
from which to think one's way up to 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 
Begin there, with the knowledge that 
God is love. Be sure that a holy 
God loves you. Be sure that because 
He is holy, His wrath, the indignant, 
sorrowful wrath of holy love, is re- 
vealed from heaven against all ungod- 
liness and unrighteousness of men. 
Be sure that that tremendous love 
has expressed itself in sacrificial suf- 
fering to save you from that tremen- 
dous wrath. Take these thoughts, 
put them together, and realize two 
facts : the nature of sin, the Person 
of Christ. Realize the nature of sin ; 
it is a scorn of the Atonement, a con- 
tempt of Gods supreme declaration 
of love, a delivering over of one's self 
to wrath, the wrath which is, be- 
cause God is holy. Realize the 

24 



The Atonement 

Person of Christ. Behold in Him 
the holy God Whose wrath is revealed 
against sin, suffering in the flesh for 
love 9 to save from that wrath. Realize 
the Godhead of Christ. Grasp the 
sense in which Christ declares the 
Unity of Godhead when He says : 
" I and my Father are One ; " and 
realizing the Unity of the Godhead, 
bow before the Cross as before a 
throne. 



25 



II 



THE EXTENT OF THE ATONEMENT; 
OR, FOR WHOM DID CHRIST DIE? 



27 



Jesus Christ the righteous is the propitiation 
for our sins ; and not for ours only, but also for 
the whole world. 

First Epistle of St. John. 

We behold Him Who hath been made a little 
lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the 
suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, 
that by the grace of God He should taste death 
for every man. 

Epistle to the Hebrews. 



28 



Chapter II 

The Extent of the Atonement ; or, 
For whom did Christ die? 

The subject now brought to our 
attention is the Extent of the Atone- 
ment. This is the next step, logically 
speaking, following the position de- 
fined in the preceding chapter. We 
sought a basis on which to rest the 
idea of an Atonement; a starting- 
point from which to think our way up 
to Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 
That basis we found in the proposi- 
tion : The Atonement not the cause 
of God's Love, but Love the cause 
of the Atonement. Examining the 
former and negative member of the 
proposition in the light of Scripture, 

we concluded that the Atonement is 

29 



The Extent of the Atonement 

not the cause of God's love, inas- 
much as there could not be division 
and conflict of motives in the God- 
head ; the Father hating man and 
wishing to destroy him ; the Son 
loving man and interposing to save 
him from the Father, and to turn the 
disposition of the Father from wrath 
to love. Examining the latter and 
positive member of the proposition, 
we concluded that " Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified " is the supreme ex- 
pression of the love of the Father; 
that, in the words of St. John, " the 
Father sent the Son to be the Saviour 
of the world," and that in the words 
of St. Paul, " God commendeth His 
own love toward us, in that, while 
we were yet sinners, Christ died for 
us." And our starting-point was, 
accordingly, thus defined ; not in the 
pride of reason, nor with the confi- 
dence of dogmatic assertion, but in 
the humility and reverence befitting 
those who are founding all their 

30 



The Extent of the Atonement 

thought upon the authenticity of 
Scripture, the inspiration of Scrip- 
ture, and the Godhead of Christ : 
Not God loves us because Christ died 
for us, but Christ died for us because 
God loves us. 

With this starting-point ascertained 
and defined, the next step is to inquire 
into the extent of the Atonement; 
that is to say, the wideness of its 
application. Assuming the Atone- 
ment to be the supreme expression 
of God s love, the question follows : 
To whom is this expression of love 
addressed ? On whose behalf did the 
Atonement take place ? For whom 
did Christ die ? For one ? for some ? 
or for all ? 

It is quite evident that both the 
degree of interest and the kind of 
interest excited in our minds by the 
Atonement are affected by our opin- 
ion of its extent. An event which 
concerns one, or some, cannot rank 
in interest with an event which 

31 



The Extent of the Atonement 

equally concerns all. All men of 
intelligence may take a certain kind 
of interest in an occurrence affecting 
one individual, or one class of indi- 
viduals ; but the interest so awakened 
is different in kind as well as in degree 
from that which every man takes in 
an event immediately affecting him- 
self. 

In the foregoing observations on 
the subject of the Atonement, and in 
all that may follow, the writer desires 
only that he may be regarded as a 
seeker after truth in the Word of God. 
He has no discoveries to announce, 
no original conclusions to propound, 
no claim to make upon public atten- 
tion which rests in intellectual certi- 
tude ; above all, no assault to bring 
against those whose thought has 
worked out on other lines. He is but 
a seeker after truth in the place where 
alone the truth he seeks may be found, 
— that is, in the inspired Scriptures. 
Other truths may be sought and 

32 



The Extent of the Atonement 

found in other places. Astronomy 
has its own gospel of the glory of 
God to proclaim from the star spaces 
of the ecliptic and the orbits of the 
planets; Archaeology has its own 
gospel of the antiquity of man to 
proclaim from the lake-dwellings of 
Switzerland, the shell-mounds of 
Denmark, the caves of Belgium and 
Sicily and Gibraltar; but the Gospel 
of the Divine Sacrifice is proclaimed 
only from the Scriptures, and apart 
from them we have no means of com- 
prehending the work of Christ. It 
is, however, impossible to give any 
answer whatsoever to the question 
" For whom did Christ die ? " without 
referring to the great historical divide 
which distinguishes those who inter- 
pret the Scripture teaching on the 
death of Christ as declaring a limited 
Atonement from those who interpret 
that teaching as the declaration of a 
universal Atonement. There are four 
ways of answering the question, " For 
3 33 



The Extent of the Atonement 

whom did Christ die ? " He died for 
none ; or He died for some one favored 
individual ; or He died for a portion 
of the human race ; or He died for all. 
With the first and the second of 
these answers we have no concern, 
as the facts of Scripture sweep them 
aside. It cannot be that Christ died 
for no one, that His death was a mere 
catastrophe resulting from His own 
determination to oppose and rebuke 
the Jews ; for the Word of God repre- 
sents His death as containing a pur- 
pose and a result intended to affect 
life other than His own. It cannot 
be that Christ died in the heroism of 
personal self-devotion for some one 
favored individual between whom 
and death he thrust Himself, as the 
victim of an intrepid friendship ; for 
all the facts of the case are known to 
us without the suggestion of any 
person on whose individual behalf 
He laid down His life. There remain 
open, therefore, only these alterna- 

34 



The Extent of the Atonement 

tives, — he died for some, or he died 
for all : a limited Atonement or a 
universal Atonement. 

The distinction between these two 
modes of interpreting the Scriptures 
we may describe as the great divide 
in distinctively Christian thought. 
It would take a volume to give merely 
the literary and ecclesiastical history 
of the great divide, and to follow 
through their infinitely interesting 
modifications and progressions the 
movements of thought on either side 
of this vast question : " For whom did 
Jesus Christ lay down His life ? " To 
a thoughtful and clear-visioned mind 
these movements are infinitely inter- 
esting. Such minds will not turn 
impatiently from the intense and 
anxious reasonings with which those 
who lived before us pondered the 
Cross and sought to read aright its 
message to mankind. Nor will such 
minds disparage the controversial 
literature on the Atonement as but 

35 



The Extent of the Atonement 

the cobweb-weaving and the hair- 
splitting of men who had become the 
devotees of speculative theology. 
For one finds in the times in which 
we live, and among the men and 
women whom we touch, the same 
anxious reasonings around the Cross ; 
the same longing: to obtain in the 
Word of God some answer to the 
question " For whom did Christ die ? " 
which will meet and satisfy all other 
scriptural statements bearing on the 
destiny of man under the government 
of God. The great divide exists to- 
day, and on the one side or on the 
other side each individual mind tends 
to find an answer which may for itself 
best satisfy the conditions of the case. 
Is it a limited Atonement ? or is it a 
universal Atonement ? Did He die 
for some ? or did He die for all ? 

To those who have not thought 
their way down into the depths 
of this subject, and who have not 
carefully searched their Bibles and 

36 



The Extent of the Atonement 

brought together all that they con- 
tain, not only respecting the Death 
of Christ, but also respecting the 
destiny of man ; to those who have 
lived merely upon the broad surface of 
the general idea that Christ died for 
mankind, — it may appear a most un- 
accountable and uncalled for circum- 
stance that any question should ever 
have arisen on the extent of the 
Atonement ; that any one ever sup- 
posed the Atonement to be limited 
in its extent; that all persons have 
not agreed and taken for granted 
that the Atonement is universal, and 
that Christ died for all. And this 
surprise that any have hesitated to 
affirm a universal Atonement deep- 
ens into curiosity under the state- 
ment that from a very early period 
in the history of Christian thought 
it has seemed impossible and un- 
scriptural to multitudes of intelligent 
and devout persons to affirm, in plain, 
unguarded words, that Christ died 

37 



The Extent of the Atonement 

for the whole world. Curiosity con- 
centrates itself upon the reason why 
this is so, — why any one should raise 
the question of extent, or conceive 
the idea of a limited Atonement 
What suggests the thought that the 
Atonement is not for all? An an- 
swer should be given to satisfy this 
entirely proper curiosity. It may be 
given in one sentence : The concep- 
tion of a limited Atonement arises 
from a certain mode of stating the 
doctrine of Election. It may be said 
with some degree of probability that 
no believer in the New Testament 
might ever have thought of saying 
that Christ did not die for all, except 
for a certain interpretation which 
was placed, very early in the history 
of Christian thought, upon those 
scriptures of the New Testament 
which speak of God s election and 
predestination of men. For, leaving 
for the moment out of view the scrip- 
tures speaking of Election, the natu- 

38 



The Extent of the Atonement 

ral meaning of those which speak of 
the extent of the Atonement would 
plainly appear to be that Christ 
died for all. The natural meaning, 
for example, of the following verses 
would appear to be, apart from any 
theory to the contrary, that Jesus 
Christ laid down His life for the 
whole human race, without limit or 
distinction of persons. u Jesus Christ 
the Righteous is the propitiation for 
our sins, and not for ours only, but 
also for the whole world." " We be- 
hold Him Who hath been made a 
little lower than the angels, even 
Jesus, because of the suffering of 
death crowned with glory and honor, 
that by the grace of God He should 
taste death for every man." If one 
who had never read a line of dog- 
matic theology were to pick up a slip 
of paper bearing these words, it is 
probable that they would suggest to 
his mind an Atonement for the race, 
not an atonement for a portion of the 

39 



The Extent of the Atonement 

race only. But all who have read the 
Epistle to the Romans, more espe- 
cially the ninth chapter of that epis- 
tle, and other great passages bearing 
on the same line, are aware that the 
New Testament teaches God's elec- 
tion of men quite as certainly as it 
teaches God's redemption of the 
world through Christ. But what, 
one asks, have these Election scrip- 
tures to do with a limited Atone- 
ment ? They have everything to do 
with a limited Atonement if one 
places upon them the interpretation 
which, from early times down to this 
time, has been placed upon them by 
large numbers of intelligent and de- 
vout persons. Under that interpre- 
tation they become the cause from 
which springs the fair and necessary 
conclusion that the Lord Jesus Christ 
died not for all men, but only for 
some men. Under that interpreta- 
tion they become the barrier to pre- 
vent one from logically holding any 

40 



The Extent of the Atonement 

other conclusion than that Christ did 
not, in a real sense, die for all. The 
interpretation of the Election scrip- 
tures to which we refer is that which 
regards the decree of God as uncon- 
ditional. By the unconditional de- 
cree is meant that God eternally 
chose or elected a certain portion of 
the race unto necessary and everlast- 
ing life and blessedness, and that the 
remainder of the human race, being 
not included in the scope of that 
eternal decree, is necessarily and 
everlastingly excluded from the life 
and blessedness contemplated in the 
decree. This decree is said to be 
unconditional, in that they who are 
in it cannot fall out of it ; they who 
are out of it cannot come into it. 
But what connection has this inter- 
pretation of the Election scriptures 
with the Extent of our Lord's Atone- 
ment ? A vital connection. For un- 
der this interpretation of the decree as 
unconditional, the Atonement is the 

41 



The Extent of the Atonement 

step taken by God, not to redeem 
the entire fallen race, but to accom- 
plish the salvation of that portion 
of the race which by this uncon- 
ditional decree He has eternally 
elected unto necessary and everlast- 
ing life. In other words, Christ died 
for the unconditionally elected, and 
not for the w 7 hole world. Those who 
have accepted the logical conclusion 
that the Atonement is limited in its 
actual effect to the unconditionally 
elected, do also claim that in a sense 
the Atonement may be regarded as 
universal, inasmuch as the infinite 
value of the Divine Sacrifice would 
make it sufficient, potentially, for an 
infinite number of human souls ; but 
the natural and plain sense of the 
words, " He died for all," is carefully 
modified and restricted by the state- 
ment that the benefit of our Lord's 
death cannot possibly be applied to 
any save to those who are included in 
the decree of unconditional election. 

42 



The Extent of the Atonement 

Clear statements of this position 
may be found in the writings of Dr. 
Charles Hodge, as, for example, in 
the following words : " There is a 
sense in which Christ died for all 
men. He died sufficiently for all. 
It follows from the nature of the 
Covenant of Redemption, as pre- 
sented in the Bible, that Christ did 
not die equally for all mankind, but 
that He gave Himself for His peo- 
ple, and for their redemption." 1 If 
one dissents from this conclusion, it 
follows not that he dissents from the 
Election scriptures, nor that he does 
not consider them quite so truly a 
part of God's message to the world 
as the texts announcing a universal 
Atonement, to which reference has 
already been made. The Election 
scriptures need present no stum- 
bling-block to the mind in its desire 
to believe a universal Atonement. 
One may accept them as reverently 

1 Systematic Theology, vol. ii. pp. 547, 560. 
43 



The Extent of the Atonement 

and as gladly as one accepts the four- 
teenth chapter of St. John, or the 
twelfth chapter of Hebrews. Every 
fair and open mind will discriminate 
between dissent from anything in the 
Word of God, and dissent from cer- 
tain interpretations which by men 
have been connected with certain 
portions of that Word, and have been 
regarded as authoritative and neces- 
sary interpretations. If the Election 
scriptures can only be understood to 
teach an unconditional decree, eter- 
nally electing some, eternally repro- 
bating others, who are respectively 
elected or reprobated, not for any- 
thing in themselves, but alone at the 
sovereign pleasure of the Most High, 
then it is not easy to see a logical 
escape from the doctrine of an Atone- 
ment limited to the elect; in fact, 
some may prefer, under those cir- 
cumstances, to believe the limited 
Atonement, inasmuch as the very 
w 7 ords " Universal Atonement " would 

44 



The Extent of the Atonement 

seem to mock at the misery of the 
non-elect. But one may be allowed 
to hope that the interpretation just 
described is not the only possible in- 
terpretation of the Election scrip- 
tures in the New Testament in 
accord with the Scriptures them- 
selves. One may study that which 
is revealed in the New Testament 
concerning the Decree of God, and 
find nothing that affirms the destiny 
of the members of the human race 
to be unconditionally determined by 
that decree. Undoubtedly one finds 
in the New Testament Election and 
Reprobation. But what is the nature 
of that Election ? It is possible (and 
in full conformity with Scripture) to 
look upon it as that eternal plan of 
love which dwelt always in the bosom 
of the Father for man whom He loves; 
for man, who is the offspring of His 
own life. The Election is thus the 
ideal of God for man, that every mem- 
ber of this our race entering into the 

45 



The Extent of the Atonement 

world should be in this world (then 
contemplated as a holy and unfal- 
len world), an incarnate image of 
the eternal Son. This Election 
one finds in the New Testament; 
the Father's eternal choice for us, 
the Father's predestination of us 
(in the counsel and plan of His own 
heart), that we should be a Christ-like 
race, conformed to the image of His 
Son. When the primitive, newly 
created man stood in godlike splen- 
dor of holiness and happiness in a 
holy and happy world, then began to 
be realized in the race the Election 
of God; then man stood before God 
as God's child, and God was his 
Father, and Gods delight was in him 
and God's hopes were centred upon 
him, and God's world was given him 
for a home, and God's banner over 
him was love. Then came the dread 
catastrophe of sin, of man's choice 
contrary to the will of God, the first 
great falling of the creature below 

46 



The Extent of the Atonement 

the Election and choice of the Crea- 
tor. Yet in that catastrophe, the 
beginning of human sin, there was 
a certain godlike dignity. Man's 
power to sin, — that is to say, man's 
power to choose against God or with 
God, — was the great inalienable birth- 
right of liberty from Him Whose 
breath was the life of man's spirit. 
And that catastrophe, working itself 
out in the stupendous devastation of 
a sin-stricken race, has never moved 
the heart of God from its eternal 
choice, its supreme Election. The 
love that was given to the unfallen 
man in forms of fellowship, still pours 
itself out upon the fallen man in the 
form of Atonement ; and the Elec- 
tion of the Godhead, an election of 
glory and love, was manifested a 
second time as in a new creation, 
when, in the fulness of time, God 
sent forth His Son, born of a wo- 
man, born under the law, to redeem 
them that are under the law ; that we, 

47 



The Extent of the Atonement 

a race of sons who had thrown away 
our sonship, might in Christ receive 
the adoption of sons; and, because 
we are sons, God sent forth the 
spirit of His Son into our hearts, cry- 
ing, " Abba, Father," declaring in our 
self-willed, stubborn hearts, the eter- 
nal choice of the Father for His chil- 
dren, that we should be conformed 
unto the image of His Son. This 
is thought to be a scriptural inter- 
pretation of the Election declared in 
the New Testament; an eternal plan 
for the race, conceived in the Father's 
heart, not turned aside by sin, but 
announced once more to the race in 
the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice, 
and made possible once more to the 
race in Jesus the Righteous, Who is 
the propitiation for our sins, and not 
for ours only, but also for the whole 
world. If this be the Election, what 
is the Reprobation ? If this be the 
revelation of "the riches of His glory 
upon vessels of mercy which He 

48 



The Extent of the Atonement 

afore prepared unto glory," what is 
His reprobation of " vessels of wrath 
fitted to destruction ? " It is the 
right of a holy God to reject vessels 
that refuse to be conformed to His 
purpose. One may speak of the 
wrath of God against sin, — the 
wrath of holy love, in the same breath 
with which one speaks of universal 
Atonement. 

Some say : You must not say 
universal Atonement, for it implies 
universal salvation. Would to God 
it did certainly imply universal sal- 
vation ! Would to God it were cer- 
tainly true that as Christ tasted 
death for every man, every man shall 
taste life through Christ ! Would 
to God there were no reason to 
believe that one soul for which 
Christ died shall be reprobate, a 
vessel of wrath fitted to destruction ; 
reprobate before the face of God, 
not because the love that redeemed 
it is taken away, not because the 

4 49 



The Extent of the Atonement 

Election of God towards it is other 
than a desire for its greatness and 
glory and peace, but because the 
soul, hardened through the deceitful- 
ness of sin, glorying in its shame, 
plunging into darkness away from 
Light, persists unto the bitter end 
in treading under foot the Son of 
God, and in counting the Blood of 
the Covenant, wherewith it was 
sanctified, an unholy thing ! 

There are some conclusions which 
follow from a belief that the Atone- 
ment is universal, and that Christ 
tasted death for every man. 

a. The Universal Influence of Sin 
and Death. "By one man sin en- 
tered into the world, and death by sin, 
and death passed upon all men, for 
that all have sinned." " He tasted 
death for every man." A universal 
condition called for a universal Atone- 
ment. What one needed, all needed. 
This is the great leveller of human 
distinctions. This is the common 

So 



The Extent of the Atonement 

ground on which all men must meet. 
Why should one boast himself above 
another? Why should one scornful- 
ly condemn another? Are we not all 
resting in the one hope that Christ 
died for us ? Are we not all needing 
the same Atonement ? Let a man 
then lay off his pride, and be gen- 
tle before men and humble before 
God. 

b. The Universal Obligation to 
live unto Him. " For the love of 
Christ constraineth us, because we 
thus judge that if one died for all, then 
were all dead, and that He died for 
all, that they which live should not 
henceforth live unto themselves, 
but unto Him Which died for them 
and rose again." 

c. The Universal Importance and 
Value of Human Lives. " God so 
loved the world that He gave his 
only begotton Son." If God so 
loved it, what shall be our feeling 
toward it? What shall be our esti- 

S 1 



The Extent of the Atonement 

mate and valuation of lives in the 
light of universal Atonement? " It 
is not the will of your heavenly 
Father that one of these little ones 
shall perish ! " Can there be, then, 
a fellowship with God that is care- 
less of man? a worship of God 
that is scornful of man? a love 
of God that does not include a 
broad reverence and holy compas- 
sion for human life as such, because 
of the Redemption ? 

d. The Universal Right of Lives 
to know the Gospel of their Redemp- 
tion. When He Who redeemed the 
race had consummated that uni- 
versal Atonement, He stood in His 
risen life upon the verge of His 
Ascension, and from His finished 
work He drew that last conclusion 
touching the right of a redeemed 
race to know of its Redemption: 

" Thus it is written, that the Christ 
should suffer, and rise again the third 
day from the dead ; and that repentance 

52 



The Extent of the Atonement 

and remission of sins should be preached 
in His name unto all the nations. Ye are 
witnesses of these things." 

" Go ye, therefore, and make disciples 
of all the nations, baptizing them into the 
name of the Father, and of the Son, and 
of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to ob- 
serve all things whatsoever I commanded 
you : and lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world." 



S3 



Ill 

WHY NOT FORGIVENESS WITHOUT 
SACRIFICE? 



55 



Knowing the judgment of God, that they which 
commit such things are worthy of death. 

Epistle to the Romans. 

And without shedding of blood is no remission. 
Epistle to the Hebrews. 

For He hath made Him to be sin for us, Who 
knew no sin ; that we might be made the righteous- 
ness of God in Him. 

Second Epistle to the Corinthians. 

God, sending His own Son in the likeness of 
sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, condemned 
sin in the flesh : that the requirement of the law 
might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the 
flesh, but after the spirit. 

Epistle to the Romans. 



56 



Chapter III 

Why not Forgiveness without 
Sacrifice ? 

It is necessary now to consider a 
question which has troubled and un- 
settled many minds disposed to be 
fe:r and desiring to attain a definite 
faith. This question, raised at this 
point in the study of the Divine Sacri- 
fice, appears to go back of conclusions 
already reached, and to disturb con- 
fidence in the validity of those con- 
clusions. It will be borne in mind 
that two conclusions have been 
reached in the foregoing chapters : 
first, that the love of God for man is 
the cause of the Atonement, which 
is the supreme expression of that 
love, — not that God loves us because 
Christ died for us, but that Christ 

57 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



^> 



died for us because God loves us ; 
secondly, that the Atonement con- 
sidered as to the extent of its refer- 
ence to the human race is universal 
and unlimited ; that Christ died for 
the whole world without distinction 
of persons, and not merely for a select 
portion of the race appointed unto an 
inevitable salvation by an uncondi- 
tional decree. These are the two 
conclusions which have been reached, 
and to those who can accept them 
they are full of importance and of 
comfort. They present to the mind 
God standing in an attitude of love 
toward the whole race, contemplating 
the whole race with an eternal pur- 
pose and ideal of blessedness, and by 
means of Christ's Atonement creat- 
ing a redeemed condition of the fallen 
race in which the attainment of the 
divine ideal is made at least a possi- 
bility for each member of that race. 
The effect of these conclusions upon 
some minds is to heighten immeasur- 

5* 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

ably their appreciation of the Atone- 
ment as an expression of the love of 
God. 

But at this stage, when we are dis- 
posed to feel that we have found the 
true starting-point from which to 
think our way up to Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified, a question rises before 
us that tends, if it be not clearly and 
fully answered, to unsettle confidence 
in the validity of those conclusions 
which, prior to the arising of this 
question, appeared so reasonable, so 
satisfying, so scriptural, and so pre- 
cious. This question is on the 
necessity of the Atonement. Why 
need there be any atonement ? If 
God is love, as has been so positively 
affirmed, why should there be any 
atonement ? Why is not forgiveness 
without sacrifice more worthy of 
God, and more credible in view of the 
alleged character of God, than for- 
giveness conditioned upon sacrifice, 
and upon the sacrifice of One Who is 

59 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



CD 



innocent ? This question is reason- 
able. It is not to be dismissed lightly 
or sternly, — lightly, as being a flip- 
pant and captious objection ; sternly, 
as raising a doubt man has no right to 
raise. Man has a right to raise that 
doubt and to ask that question : "Why 
not forgiveness without sacrifice ? " 
It is a question germane to the sub- 
ject under discussion. It is a question 
of the utmost value and importance, 
because, from whatever motive it may 
be asked, whether from desire for in- 
struction or from desire to assail the 
main position of evangelical religion, 
it furnishes an opportunity for the 
believer in the Atonement to disown 
some opinions erroneously attributed 
to him, and to state clearly and scrip- 
turally that which he does believe 
concerning the grounds on which the 
sacrifice of Christ may be regarded 
as a necessity. 

The propriety, reasonableness, and 
force of this question : " Why not for- 

60 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

giveness without sacrifice ? " are seen 
when, by a process of analysis, we 
note the difference between this ques- 
tion and other doubts which are fre- 
quently raised against the Christian 
doctrine of the Atonement. This 
question, " Why not forgiveness with- 
out sacrifice ? " is not a denial of sin 
as such. The sinfulness of sin is not 
disputed. Those who doubt the ne- 
cessity of the Atonement may be in 
no doubt as to the moral distinction 
between good and evil. Some who 
have discarded the Atonement have 
been eminent in morality, keen in the 
discernment of right and wrong. 
Nor is this question a denial that sin 
calls for punishment. It assumes 
God's power to forgive sin, and that 
assumption implies as the antecedent 
of forgiveness Gods right to punish 
sin. The right to punish is not 
denied. The justice of punishment 
as the proper judicial sequence of sin 
is not denied. The question is raised 

61 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



o 



on another issue, namely, whether 
God may not at His pleasure remit 
punishment by simple forgiveness 
without sacrifice. Nor is this ques- 
tion a denial that Christ died. It 
does not necessarily assail the historic 
data which point to Calvary. It does 
not decline to admit that such a Being 
as Jesus lived and labored in Pales- 
tine, and was condemned and cruci- 
fied under Pontius Pilate. It does 
not refuse to join the unnumbered 
multitude of human minds grouped 
in veneration around the Cross. Ad- 
mitting the death, it merely assigns 
to it a significance other than that of 
the Divine Sacrifice. Nor is this ques- 
tion a denial under all circumstances 
that Christ was competent to be in 
His death a sacrifice for sin. The 
denial of the Atonement may of 
course be the result of antecedent 
doubt concerning the divinity of 
Christ. But doubts concerning the 
Atonement may and do exist in 

62 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

minds that have not called in ques- 
tion the divinity of Christ. Such 
doubts spring from a cause quite 
other than that of uncertainty as to 
the competency of Jesus to offer a 
sacrifice for the world. Such doubts 
call in question the propriety of the 
Atonement as an act of God. They 
raise the issue whether it is consistent 
with the glorious and perfect charac- 
ter of God to condition the forgive- 
ness of man upon the sacrifice of the 
holy and beautiful Christ This is a 
doubt of the Atonement inspired by 
reverence for God. By this process 
of analysis it must appear that the 
question, " Why not forgiveness with- 
out sacrifice ? ' : is not flippant, im- 
proper, or essentially hostile to God, 
but serious, reasonable, and extremely 
important. If it were a question 
flippant or avowedly hostile to God, 
if it were a denial of sin, or a denial 
that sin calls for punishment, or a 
denial that Christ died, or a denial of 

63 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

Christ's divinity, it could be dealt 
with fairly, of course, and kindly, of 
course, but with much less apprehen- 
siveness of its power to unsettle 
evangelical belief. We could ap- 
peal to the instinct of human con- 
sciousness, to the facts of experience, 
to the annals of history, and thus 
sufficiently maintain our position. 
There are objections levelled against 
the Atonement which, like arrows 
shot against a granite cliff, shatter 
themselves without scarring the cliff. 
But this objection is not one of those. 
This may appeal to minds which 
luminously discern between good and 
evil, which admit the justice of pun- 
ishment as the sequence of sin, which 
worship Christ's divinity. This 
touches a point antecedent to all 
conclusions upon the nature and ex- 
tent of the Atonement. This inquires 
into the morality of a Being who could 
demand such a sacrifice as a condition 
precedent to the forgiveness of sin. 

6 4 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

In the previous chapter upon the 
Extent of the Atonement, the opinion 
is expressed that no one would have 
thought of doubting that the Bible 
represents Christ as dying for the 
whole world, but for a certain inter- 
pretation which was connected with 
certain texts of the Bible very early 
in the history of Christian thought. 
The texts referring to God's election 
of men were interpreted to mean an 
unconditional decree, absolutely de- 
termining the destiny of individuals, 
whereby some were appointed unto 
an inevitable salvation, and others, 
not included in that decree, were 
negatively appointed unto an equally 
inevitable damnation. This inter- 
pretation of these texts was strongly 
pressed in the past, and was widely 
acquiesced in, as being the only right 
interpretation of the Election scrip- 
tures. As a result, the thought of 
a limited Atonement followed ; that 
Christ died, not to redeem the entire 
5 6 S 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



£> 



race, but to secure the salvation of an 
elect portion of the race. 

It has also been pointed out in a 
previous chapter that in the process 
of religious thought the teaching has 
been announced and has widely pre- 
vailed, that God the Father loves us 
because Christ died for us ; that the 
anger of the Father was raised against 
man and was about to descend upon 
man, when the gentle, loving, and 
heroic Christ flung Himself between 
the stern Father and guilty man, 
received the outburst of wrath on His 
own innocent head, and that the 
Father, appeased by the blood of this 
self-sacrificing Victim, now consents 
to love us for the sake of Him Who 
became our champion and Who per- 
ished on our behalf. Thus there 
grew up in Christian thought the 
suggestion that the Christian Gospel 
distinguishes between the purpose of 
the Father and the purpose of the Son 
in dealing with the human race ; that 

66 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

the Father, being angry, wanted to 
destroy us for our sins, but the Son, 
being lovely, sympathetic, and hero- 
ically unselfish, interposed, and by a 
tragic self-surrender to the Fathers 
wrath turned that wrath away. It 
is safe to say that this mode of 
stating the gospel, — a mode which 
w r ould apparently imperil belief in the 
unity of the Godhead, — might never 
have become current if all whose 
duty it is to guide religious thought 
had kept themselves humbly and 
obediently close to the Bible, which 
announces in language no man need 
misunderstand : " We believe and do 
testify, that the Father sent the Son 
to be the Saviour of the world," and 
" God so loved the world that He gave 
His only begotten Son, that whoso- 
ever believeth in Him should not 
perish, but have everlasting life." It 
would be difficult to account for the 
extent to which the question, " Why 
not forgiveness without sacrifice ? " 

67 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



£> 



has operated as a barrier to faith 
without referring, respectfully and 
with moderation, to the prominence 
once given in evangelistic teaching 
to the doctrine of the Unconditional 
Decree, and to the idea (incorporated 
alike in prose and in poetry) of the 
wrathful Father appeased by the 
merciful Son. 

That the idea of an unconditional 
decree of Election adds force to the 
claim that forgiveness should take 
place without sacrifice will appear 
upon reflection. If it be true that 
the sovereign pleasure of God has 
decreed the inevitable salvation and 
blessedness of a portion of the race, 
appointing them thereto not because 
of any worthiness in themselves, but 
wholly as an exhibition of the right 
of sovereignty and the purpose of 
love, and if for the same august end 
of sovereignty the rest of the race, 
excluded from that decree, is doomed 
to an inevitable damnation, he who 

68 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



ZD 



claims forgiveness without sacrifice 
is inclined to ask why this situation 
should have its terrific simplicity dis- 
turbed by the introduction of Christ 
as an innocent and bloody sacrifice? 
On whose behalf, it is asked, could 
such a sacrifice be required? To 
whose advantage could it inure? 
Not to the damned, for they are 
damned not first of all in their own 
right and by their own misdeeds, but 
first of all by exclusion from an un- 
conditional decree antedating their 
existence. And why, it is still fur- 
ther asked, should the elect require 
atonement if their election be the out- 
come of God's " mere free grace and 
love, without any foresight of faith 
or good works, or perseverance in 
either of them, or any other thing in 
the creature, as conditions or causes 
moving Him thereunto, and all to 
the praise of His glorious grace"? 
Why, it is asked (not by persons of 
flippant temper or hostile spirit, but 

69 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

by those who seek a basis for their 
faith), if men are lost and saved on 
these grounds, is it not more merci- 
ful and consistent with God to spare 
the non-elect the torment of witness- 
ing an atonement in whose efficacy 
they cannot share, and to spare Christ 
the misery of enduring supreme 
humiliation for those who, by a decree 
of election, were inevitably saved 
from all eternity ? This is the inquiry 
of some minds that would fain be 
evangelical believers ; and the rights 
of men seeking for a Biblical faith in 
Christ as a Saviour, justify the state- 
ment of their difficulty, and the re- 
spectful intimation of its possible 
cause. ' 

It will also be seen that the idea, 
once so prevalent and so prominent, 
of the wrathful Father appeased by 
the merciful Son, may have operated 
to strengthen the claim that forgive- 
ness without sacrifice is more cred- 
ible, because more consonant with the 

70 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

glorious and perfect character of God 
as a God of love than forgiveness 
conditioned on the sacrifice of the 
innocent. If Christian literature and 
Christian pulpits have represented 
God the Father as burning with a 
wrathful purpose to destroy man for 
his sins, and, being interrupted in 
that purpose by the intervention of 
the holy and compassionate Son, as 
seizing upon that spotless and un- 
complaining victim and wreaking on 
him the vengeance which has its 
thirst slaked with Christ's blood, — the 
rejection of the Atonement by some 
persons of intelligence is not unlikely. 
Wherever this form of stating the 
Atonement gains ground, it tends to 
raise in some minds not hostile to 
God, but jealous rather to defend the 
glory and purity of God, some most 
disturbing and unsettling objections, 
all of which appear to strengthen the 
probability of forgiveness without 
sacrifice. 

7i 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

It is objected, to the idea of an 
angry Fathers wrath being appeased 
by the blood of the innocent Son, 
that such an atonement, if offered, 
would be ineffective, inasmuch as the 
innocent is represented as being 
punished, while the guilty escape. 
It is objected that such an atonement 
prevents God forever from punishing 
a human being, inasmuch as having 
taken vengeance on one Being for 
human offences, He has no right to 
demand punishment a second time 
for the same offences. It is objected 
that Christ's sufferings, in view of 
His undoubted innocency, are an ar- 
bitrary and needless infliction, which 
reveals on the part of God a vindictive 
and sanguinary temper, inconsistent 
with the character of a Holy Being. 
It is objected that our own presup- 
position of the authority of God, as 
w r ell as of His mercy, makes it neces- 
sary to believe that He has both the 
ability and the desire to forgive sins 

72 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

without sacrifice; that we cannot 
imagine God to be less noble and 
generous than a man, who, having 
been injured, displays magnanimity, 
and freely, unconditionally forgives 
him who has done the injury, and 
who is incapable of repairing the in- 
jury he has done. It has been known 
that a man who, in a fit of passion, 
struck another and put out his eye, 
committing thus an injury he could 
not repair, was truly and uncondition- 
ally forgiven by his injured com- 
panion. Can we suppose, it is asked, 
that such magnanimity in a man is 
more godlike than God Himself? 
Are we not, then, driven to reject the 
Atonement, and to believe instead in 
forgiveness without sacrifice ? 

Of course these objections are, to 
a large extent, removed from the 
mind of a thoughtful and reasonable 
man the moment he is shown that 
they rest on an interpretation of the 
Bible teaching of the Divine Sacrifice, 

73 



Foreiveness without Sacrifice 



^> 



which need not be regarded as shut- 
ting out other interpretations. If the 
Bible can only be regarded as teach- 
ing that the Father is appeased by 
the death of the Son, then these 
foregoing objections appear to be 
unanswerable. But when it is seen 
that such interpretations are not 
necessary interpretations, but that 
one may hold, with the simple lan- 
guage of the Record, that the Father 
sent the Son, and commended His 
love to us in so doing, that the Son 
came in holy willingness as the su- 
preme manifestation of the Fathers 
purpose, and that, in the unity of the 
Godhead, the loving purpose of the 
Father to redeem and the loving act 
of the Son in redemption are but two 
inseparable sides of one idea ; when 
this is shown to be an idea conform- 
able with Scripture, then to a very 
large extent the foregoing objections 
are removed from a reasonable mind. 
There is no longer any occasion to 

74 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

call in question the morality of God 
in exacting suffering from an innocent 
Being to satisfy anger stirred by the 
sins of the guilty. Such a conception 
of God vanishes like a grim nocturnal 
shadow before the dawn, and in the 
calm and holy light of truth one sees 
simply these three things: the holy 
love of God the Father forthe beloved 
race of mankind ; the holy wrath of 
God the Righteous against sin as an 
intolerable condition in the universe, 
calling, on moral grounds, for its 
condemnation in the punishment of 
those who commit it ; the holy Sacri- 
fice of Christ the God-man to meet 
on behalf of a beloved but sinful race 
that inevitable moral demand for the 
judgment and condemnation of sin. 

In the calm, holy light of Bible 
truth, w 7 here stand revealed these 
three inseparable ideas : God the 
Loving, desiring the best for man ; 
God the Righteous, condemning, by 
the moral necessity of His Being, sin 

75 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



o 



as an intolerable element in the uni- 
verse ; God the Sacrifice, enduring in 
Himself, by obedience unto death, 
that necessary condemnation of sin 
on behalf of a beloved race, — in the 
light of this truth we begin to read an 
answer to this great question : Why 
not forgiveness without sacrifice ? 
The answer is this : Because of that 
moral necessity in the Nature of God 
which calls for the condemnation of 
sin. It cannot be necessary to defend 
with argument the proposition of 
such a moral necessity in the Nature 
of God as calls for the condemnation 
of sin. To some extent we are con- 
scious of that moral necessity in 
ourselves, not only in moments of 
disgust and loathing following an 
evil indulgence, but also, and far more 
surely, in moments of spiritual 
strength and vision, when, lifted near 
to God, we have discerned, as from 
His side, the goodness of good and 
the sinfulness of sin. To some extent 

76 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 

we are conscious of that moral neces- 
sity as confessed in the life of the 
community and of the nation in its un- 
dying struggle after public righteous- 
ness, its eternal condemnation of 
public sin. But when we lift our 
thought to God the Righteous, the 
existence of a moral necessity in His 
Nature calling for the condemnation 
of sin becomes an axiom, a self- 
evident proposition transcending 
demonstration. Apart from it, God 
the Righteous is unthinkable. For 
there are but four attitudes possible 
in any being toward sin, — ignorance, 
indifference, consent, condemnation. 
God the Righteous cannot be igno- 
rant; God the Righteous cannot be 
indifferent ; God the Righteous can- 
not consent ; God the Righteous 
must condemn, must under the moral 
necessity of His Being. But how is 
condemnation to be expressed ? In 
two ways only is it expressible to man 
on the part of God, — through precept 

77 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



o 



and through penalty. When the first 
fails there remains only the second. 
God condemned sin by precept to the 
unfallen world : " Eat not of it, for in 
the day when thou eatest thereof, thou 
shalt surely die." The wrath of God 
was revealed from heaven against all 
sin, all ungodliness and unrighteous- 
ness of men. The judgment of God 
was known, that they which commit 
such things are worthy of death. 
The condemnation of sin through 
precept was universally published ; it 
was written in the natural conscience, 
it was spoken in the law. God was 
true to the moral necessity of His Na- 
ture in openly condemning sin and 
warning against it. In vain ; the free- 
dom of man challenged the precept 
of God. " By one man sin entered 
into the world, and death by sin ; and 
death passed upon all men, for that all 
have sinned." The condemnation of 
sin by penalty became, therefore, in 
the failure of precept, a moral neces- 

78 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



& 



sity in the nature of God the 
Righteous. He could not do other- 
wise. There is nothing of passion, 
nothing of revenge, nothing of hatred, 
nothing of sanguinary desire in God's 
punishing of sin. The punishment 
of sin is the condemnation of sin by 
penalty, its condemnation by precept 
having failed. Therefore to suggest 
forgiveness without sacrifice is to 
suggest a knowledge of sin on God's 
part unaccompanied by His condem- 
nation of it. If it be true that there 
are but four attitudes toward sin, — 
ignorance, indifference, consent, or 
condemnation, — forgiveness without 
sacrifice would mean, apparently, sin 
without condemnation, leaving the 
alternatives of ignorance, of indiffer- 
ence, or of consent. Well has the 
Scripture said : " Without shedding 
of blood there is no remission. " 

But if all that has been thus far 
said has somewhat cleared the sub- 
ject, there will remain in some minds 

79 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



CD 



a serious question unanswered. 
Granting all that has been claimed 
in this chapter, how, in what sense, 
does the sacrifice of Christ atone 
for sin ? Thus : the Holy Sacrifice 
of the God-Man meets, on behalf 
of a beloved but sinful race, that 
necessary moral demand in the 
Nature of God the Righteous for 
the judgment and condemnation of 
sin. " God, sending His own Son 
in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as 
an offering for sin, condemned sin in 
the flesh, that the requirement of the 
law (that is, the moral necessity 
which exists in God's Nature, that 
sin shall be condemned before it is 
forgiven) might be fulfilled in us, 
who walk not after the flesh, but 
after the Spirit." Here is the heart 
of the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice. 
A moral necessity in the Nature of 
God requires sins condemnation. 
The proclaiming of that condem- 
nation in precept failed. It failed 

80 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



a 



through the inalienable freedom of 
man. There remained only pen- 
alty. Sin must be condemned unto 
death before it can be forgiven. 
The judgment of God is that they 
which commit such things are 
worthy of death. And the tender 
love of God has for us men, and for 
our salvation, met, through Christ, 
that moral necessity in the nature 
of God's righteousness which com- 
pels that sin be condemned unto 
death ere it can be forgiven. The 
Divine Sacrifice, the Death of Christ, 
is Gods way of love to meet the 
moral demand of His own Being. 
The Death of Christ is God's con- 
demnation of sin. Christ becoming 
obedient unto death, therein consents 
to that law of righteousness in Gods 
Nature which condemns sin. That 
condemnation of sin was made 
on behalf of the whole race ; He 
tasted death, He fulfilled the law of 
righteousness, for every man. And 

6 81 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



& 



now no obstacle remains in the path 
of God's forgiveness of sins but one, 
— the will of each individual man. 
Will the individual person identify 
himself with Christ in His Death 
by believing on Him as the Divine 
Sacrifice for sins ? Will he begin 
to do this by the act of faith, that 
is, by voluntarily uniting himself to 
Christ in His obedience to the con- 
demnation of sin, and by rising 
with Him into newness of life, hence- 
forth to walk not after the flesh, but 
after the Spirit ? Will he glorify 
the righteousness of God in the 
condemnation of sin by this identi- 
fying of himself with the Divine 
Sacrifice ? Or will he turn away from 
the Christ hard in heart, proud in 
spirit, trusting in his own righteous- 
ness, venturing to believe that God 
will deny His Nature by forgiving 
sin without the solemn consent of 
the human will, in the act of faith, to 
the condemnation of sin by the Death 

82 



Forgiveness without Sacrifice 



£> 



of Christ? Salvation appears to de- 
pend on this decision. Christ is our 
Shelter from the condemnation of sin. 
Disbelieving Him, we invite the pen- 
alty of sin upon ourselves. It is well 
to hear His own words, and to take 
them at their full value : " He that 
believeth on Him is not judged : He 
that believeth not hath been judged 
already, because he hath not believed 
on the Name of the Only Begotten 
Son of God." 



83 



IV 



THE SORROW OF CHRIST IN HIS 
SACRIFICE 



85 



A Man of Sorrows. 

Prophecy of Isaiah. 

Then cometh Jesus unto Gethsemane, and 
began to be sorrowful and sore troubled. Then 
saith He unto them, My soul is exceeding sor- 
rowful, even unto death. 

Gospel of St. Matthew. 

Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup 
from Me ; nevertheless, not My Will, but Thine, 
be done. 

Gospel of St. Luke. 

Ye shall drink indeed of My cup. 

Gospel of St. Matthew. 

That I may know Him, and the fellowship of 
His sufferings. 

Epistle to the Philippians. 



86 



Chapter IV 

The Sorrow of Christ in His 
Sacrifice 

It may be profitable, at this point, 
to review in outline the ground 
already traversed. 

In entering upon a study of the 
Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice, we 
sought a starting-point from which 
to think our way up to Jesus Christ 
and Him crucified. We found what 
we sought in the proposition: The 
Atonement not the cause of Gods 
Love, but Love the cause of the 
Atonement ; not, God loves us be- 
cause Christ died for us, but Christ 
died for us because God loves us. 
The Atonement was seen to be the 
supreme expression of God s eternal 
love for man ; and the Unity of the 
Godhead was seen to be manifested 

87 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

in the oneness of the Father's pur- 
pose in sending the Son to be the 
Saviour of the world, with the purpose 
of the Son in coming to redeem the 
world. From that starting-point we 
have made two considerable advances 
toward a reverential and humble inter- 
pretation of the Divine Sacrifice. We 
have investigated the Atonement as to 
the extent of its reference to mankind, 
and as to the necessity for its occur- 
rence as a condition precedent to the 
forgiveness of sins. As to the extent 
of the Atonement in its reference to 
mankind, we conclude in the light 
of Scripture, that it is universal and 
not limited ; that Christ died as the 
Redeemer of the whole world with- 
out distinction of persons, and not 
merely to secure the salvation of a 
selected portion of the human race. 
As to the necessity for the Atone- 
ment, as a condition precedent to 
the forgiveness of sins, we have 
asked a serious practical question — 

88 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

Why not forgiveness without sacri- 
fice? — and have thus answered it: 
Because of a moral necessity in the 
Nature of God the Righteous, calling 
for the condemnation of sin before 
they who have committed sin can be 
forgiven. We pointed out that there 
appear to be but four possible atti- 
tudes toward sin which can be taken 
by a rational being, — ignorance, in- 
difference, consent, or condemnation. 
God the Righteous cannot be igno- 
rant ; He cannot be indifferent ; He 
cannot consent ; He must, therefore, 
by the moral necessity of His Being, 
pronounce upon sin the judgment of 
condemnation. We stated that the 
condemnation of sin on the part of 
God the Righteous is expressible to 
man in two ways, — by precept and 
by penalty; that the condemnation 
of sin by precept was God's first 
method, when, to an unfallen race, 
still standing before Him in the 

strength and beauty of primeval 

89 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

innocence, He gave the clear warn- 
ing that sin is an intolerable evil in 
His sight. We recalled the fact that 
the freedom of man challenged the 
precept of God by insisting upon the 
exercise of liberty in choices con- 
trary to the will of God, thereby 
precipitating into human experience 
a condition of sin. Gods condem- 
nation of sin by precept having 
failed to deter man from making sin 
his own experience, and sin being 
forthwith a fact in human life, God's 
further condemnation of it by pen- 
alty was inevitable under the moral 
necessity in God's Nature by which 
He cannot consent to the existence 
of this intolerable evil. Death came 
by sin, as its penalty, its wages, a 
bodily and a spiritual doom, devel- 
oped in the nature of the case 
through the antagonism of free 
beings to a Divine order of life. 
But that moral necessity in God 
which requires that sin shall be 

90 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

condemned through penalty ere it 
can be forgiven, cannot be separated, 
even in our thought, from that 
eternal love in God which yearns to 
forgive the sinful. And the Atone- 
ment is the way whereby, in the 
Unity of the Godhead, eternal love 
satisfied the moral necessity of 
eternal righteousness. " God send- 
ing His own Son, in the likeness of 
sinful flesh, and as an offering for 
sin, condemned sin in the flesh ; " t. e n 
in the Incarnate Christ. The Sacri- 
fice of the Incarnate Christ is an act 
of the Godhead, done in the Person 
of the Divine Son, on behalf of the 
human race, as a solemn condemna- 
tion of sin through death. On the 
Cross of Christ, in the Body and Soul 
of the Representative Man, the sin 
of man is judged and condemned 
unto death, as a thing intolerable in 
the universe of God ; and thus eter- 
nal love itself meets the demand of 
eternal righteousness, and through 

9* 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

a Divine Sacrifice, by enduring the 
condemnation of sin, makes possible 
its forgiveness. Every obstacle in 
the path of forgiveness is thus re- 
moved, save one, — the will of the 
individual. The race, as a race, is 
redeemed, in that the sins of the 
whole world are condemned in the 
Sacrifice of Christ, as the Represen- 
tative of the race ; but the individual, 
as an individual, the man, the woman, 
the child, is saved only when the 
personal will consents to the right- 
eousness of sins condemnation as 
accomplished in Christ's Sacrifice ; 
when the person identifies himself or 
herself, by faith, with the humiliated, 
suffering, crucified Saviour ; dying 
with Christ, as it were, unto sin, as 
unto an accursed and intolerable 
condition, and rising with Christ, as 
it were, unto newness of life, to walk 
not after the flesh, but after the 
Spirit. This recapitulation of the 

argument is found to have been 

92 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

advantageous when we approach our 
present theme, which is the Sorrow 
of Christ in His Sacrifice. It is 
impossible to affirm the nature of 
His Sorrow without affirming the 
nature of His Sacrifice, and the 
nature of His Sacrifice depends on 
the constitution of His Person. 
What He suffered depends on what 
He did, and what He did depends 
on what He is. 

Sorrow is one of the most ele- 
mentary conditions of organic life in 
a world disordered by sin. Sin's 
disorder extends far beyond the con- 
fines of human life, as the rings on 
the lake spread in circles immensely 
greater than the stone dropped there- 
in. Intelligence, human or pre- 
human, sins ; creation suffers. " The 
whole creation groaneth and tra- 
vaileth in pain." The Bible reveals 
sin as older and wider than human- 
ity. The tragedy of Satan's fall is 
older than that of the race which 

93 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

fell by a Satanic temptation. As 
the fossil secrets of the rocks are 
discovered, we find pain and sorrow 
were here, in the struggles and woes 
of the lower animals, ere there were 
human hearts to break or human 
eyes to weep. 

Upon studying the great fact of 
sorrow, we find it to contain grada- 
tions and variations. Sorrows are 
differentiated not only in degree 
but in kind. Sorrows vary in kind 
where the beings who experience 
them vary in nature. The sorrow 
of a bird whose nest has been robbed, 
or of a beast whose young are slain 
before her eyes, are types of sorrow 
conditioned on the nature of the 
beast and the bird. The sorrow of 
a mother at the death-bed of her 
child includes, it may be, the instinc- 
tive grief of all living creatures in 
the destruction of their offspring, — 
but who will describe the sorrow of 
a bereaved human mother as differ- 

94 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

ing only in degree from that of the 
animal whose young is slain ? It is 
a difference in kind, conditioned on 
the superior nature of the human 
being, who, with a heart capable of 
nobler affection, a mind gifted with 
rational powers, a spirit competent 
to love or to hate God, transforms 
sorrow into something unknowable 
by an inferior order of being. As 
for the gradations of sorrow between 
beings possessing the same nature, 
such as, for example, human nature, 
it seems reasonable to look upon 
such gradations as differences in 
degree, rather than in kind. Fre- 
quently contrasts are drawn between 
the sorrows of the ignorant and 
unrefined and the sorrows of those 
whose natures have been highly 
trained, and the claim is made that 
culture removes, by a process of 
elevation, one part of the human 
race so far from the other parts of 
the human race, that the sorrows 

95 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

of cultivated natures differ in kind, 
as well as in degree, from those 
of the ignorant and uncultivated 
classes. This claim is a pleasing 
one from the point of view of edu- 
cated humanity. It seems to reserve 
for refined natures a certain exclusive- 
ness in grief as w r ell as in pleasure. 
But as one grows to know humanity 
better, one questions the logic of 
this claim. It is true that conven- 
tional advantages and superior train- 
ing tend to increase the capacity 
for experiencing certain forms of 
pleasure and of pain, as well as for 
manifesting certain types of joy 
and of sorrow ; but he who in his 
study of humanity goes beneath these 
external differences, may expect to 
find the fundamental phenomena of 
sorrow the same in all who share 
the common nature. 

Proceeding along this line of 
reasoning, we come at length to the 
Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice, 

96 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

and to a thoughtful and inquiring 
mind, inclined to seek by investiga- 
tion a basis for its faith rather than 
to accept without questioning the 
ancestral positions of historic belief, 
the very phrase, "the Sorrow of 
Christ" is a challenge to the reason. 
Why is it a challenge to the reason ? 
Because it seems to make the Sorrow 
of Christ unique. Because, in a 
world filled with sorrow, where it 
is impossible to escape the incessant 
sights and sounds of grief, save by 
fleeing to the desert and leading a 
hermit s life ; in a world where the 
tragic element is incessantly present, 
where forever some Rachel is weep- 
ing for her children, some human 
body is quivering in mortal anguish, 
some home is being plunged in new- 
made woe, some hopes are being 
grimly wrecked; in a world where 
some lives are always rising into 
awful prominence by reason of their 
extraordinary sorrow, the Sorrow of 
7 97 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

Jesus Christ in His Sacrifice stands 
from age to age supreme and un- 
approached by any other grief of 
earth. The woes of more than five 
and twenty centuries have come and 
gone since he who was called the 
" Evangelical Prophet ,J composed 
that simple phrase, " a Man of Sor- 
rows " as a portrait of Christ ; and 
to-day, though millions of men have 
sorrowed since, there is in the 
thought of the world One, and only 
One, " Man of Sorrows." Millions 
of men have approached those great 
life-sorrows which stand like dark 
Gethsemanes in the path of human 
feet, yet to One, and to One only, 
do we feel the right, or even the in- 
clination, to apply the words of that 
majestic narrative : " Then cometh 
He unto Gethsemane, and began to 
be sorrowful and sore troubled ; 
Then saith He unto them, My soul 
is exceeding sorrowful, even unto 
death." This is a challenge to 

98 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

the reason because it differentiates 
between the Sorrow of Christ and 
the sorrow of other beings in a 
manner which leaves little room for 
any other conclusion than that the 
Sorrow of Christ is believed to be 
different in kind from the sorrows of 
all other beings. It is not here for- 
gotten that another conclusion has 
been reached by many gifted and 
refined minds touching the Sorrow 
of Christ. Full value should be 
given and due respect should be 
paid to the opinion of those, who, 
believing Christ to be the Son of 
God only in the sense of being the 
most Godlike of men, describe His 
Sacrifice as an heroic martyrdom 
for righteousness' sake, and His 
Sorrow as the grief of a beautiful 
soul, conquering its agony by 
patience and fortitude ; and greater 
only in degree than the sorrows of 
others, because springing from a 
nature more pure and more heroic 

99 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

than that of other men. One is 
impressed with the intellectual and 
moral beauty of many who have 
defended this Humanitarian View of 
the Person of Christ, but reason 
seems to be challenged by the facts 
of Christian history and by the de- 
clarations of Christian Scriptures to 
furnish some foundation broader 
and deeper than that of the senti- 
ment of admiration to account for the 
supreme position which through eigh- 
teen centuries of theological changes 
has been steadily assigned to the 
Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice. 
It was frankly stated at the outset 
of this study in Evangelical belief 
that the Authenticity of Scripture, 
the Inspiration of Scripture, and the 
Godhead of Christ are assumed. 
Proceeding on the basis of these 
assumptions (and they are here 
stated as assumptions only because 
time forbids a statement of the 
grounds on which they rest), it 

IOO 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

must appear that the nature of 
Christ's Sorrow in His Sacrifice 
depends on the Nature of Christ's 
Person in His Incarnation. What 
He suffered depends on what He is. 
If His Nature is simply the most 
perfect example of our own nature, 
we are justified in looking upon His 
Sorrow as such as our own would be 
under similar circumstances, only 
greater in degree. If His Nature, 
beside including a perfect humanity, 
was also the Nature of the Godhead, 
then Christ's Sorrow in His Sacrifice, 
while on its human side such as man 
may to some extent experience, is 
also on its Divine side such as God 
only can experience ; such as differs, 
not in degree alone, but in kind, 
from the sorrow of man. 

Who, then, is this Man of Sor- 
rows ? He is God, clothed in hu- 
man nature. Why has God clothed 
Himself in human nature ? That 
He may stand visibly before men 

IOI 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

as their Representative, and, as such, 
meet by death that moral necessity 
of God's righteousness which re- 
quires the condemnation of sin ere 
it can be forgiven. Christ is not a 
holy human being acting as God's 
Representative. Christ is God act- 
ing as mans Representative, by 
clothing Himself in man's nature, 
and suffering therein for man's sake. 
Christ is the Second Member of the 
Godhead, and the Unity of the God- 
head is not interrupted by His 
Incarnation. He is continuously 
and forever, God the Son, One in 
Substance, One in Purpose, with 
God the Father. The attitude of 
the Godhead toward the human 
race is the attitude of love. In the 
Father that attitude finds expres- 
sion when the Father sends the Son 
to be the Saviour of the world. * In 
the Son, that attitude finds expres- 
sion when the Son enters the world 
clothed in human nature, as man's 

I02 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

Representative, and saying by His 
very presence on earth : " Lo, I come 
to do the Fathers will." The Per- 
son of Christ is, then, something 
utterly and absolutely unique. 
Never before was there, never 
afterwards could there be, another 
Christ. He stands alone, neces- 
sarily unique. " I am Alpha and 
Omega, the Beginning and the 
Ending, the First and the Last." 
In Him is our nature truly and ver- 
itably present; the power to think 
our thoughts, to know our experi- 
ences, to bear our griefs, to carry 
our sorrows. In Him is also the 
Nature of the Godhead truly and 
veritably present : the eternal love 
of the Godhead for the human race, 
purposing the glory of the race, 
sorrowing over its downfall ; the 
eternal righteousness of the God- 
head, moved, by the moral neces- 
sity of the Being of God, with 
everlasting wrath and antagonism 

103 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

against sin, as an intolerable con- 
dition in the universe. Assuming 
the Authenticity and Inspiration of 
the Holy Scripture, and speaking 
simply as a reporter of their con- 
tents, one must fearlessly say that 
the Scriptures require us to regard 
the Person of Christ as that of God 
clothed in human nature, real hu- 
manity coexisting with veritable and 
unqualified Godhead. His assump- 
tion of humanity is not accomplished 
by His resignation of Godhead. 
He does not become man by ceas- 
ing to be God, but in the uninter- 
rupted life and consciousness of 
His Godhead He assumes once and 
forever the nature of man ; for three 
and thirty years, carrying it amidst 
conditions of humiliation consum- 
mated in death, and thence, onward 
and eternally, carrying it in the 
power and blessedness of Risen 
Glory. Upon the basis of such a 
doctrine of the Person of Christ 

104 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

it is easy to foresee the conclusions 
which must follow concerning the 
Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice. 
What He suffered depends on what 
He is. Granting that the Person 
of Christ is the Person of the God- 
Man, the conclusions are irresistible 
touching the nature of His sorrow. 
The Sorrow of Christ in His Sacri- 
fice is the sorrow of man under con- 
ditions of supreme humiliation. 
The Sorrow of Christ in His Sac- 
rifice is the Sorrow of God making 
Atonement for sin. Into these con- 
clusions we must look. 

The Sorrow of Christ in His Sacra- 
fice is the sorrow of man under 
conditions of supreme humiliation. 
Human hearts in all ages have been 
drawn to the Cross by the power of 
sympathy. The appeal of that mar- 
vellous countenance of the Man of 
Sorrows, marred by the ravages of 
grief, has always been, to multitudes, 
irresistible. Has it been an illusion 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

or a mistake that we have seemed to 
see in the Man of Sorrows something 
we could understand, something that 
could understand us? Has it been 
an error that even many of us Pro- 
testants cannot stand unmoved be- 
fore the crucifix, nor doubt that in 
some manner that emblem of the 
grief of the Sacrifice takes hold upon 
our hearts ? Is it a dream, which a 
better knowledge of Him might dis- 
solve, that when we have suffered in 
our temptations, tossed in our fever- 
ish sickness, trembled in the loneli- 
ness of our responsibilities, wept in 
secret over our public humiliations, 
or sat speechless and stonelike to 
watch the ashen pallor of death 
change the face of our dearly loved 
one, we have been calmed, if not 
composed, by the thought of the 
Sorrow of Christ ? Was there noth- 
ing real in the instinct which bade 
us bring Him into places in our life, 
too deep, too dark, too dreary for 

106 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

others to enter; which prompted us to 
believe that His experience of sorrow 
had preceded and could comprehend 
our own? It was not a dream. It 
was not an error. The Sorrow of 
Christ was the sorrow of man, and 
as such, it is supreme among the 
sorrows of men and precious to all 
men of sorrows. Supreme and 
precious because the perfection of 
His Humanity enabled Him without 
let or hindrance to explore, through 
experience, the possibilities of sorrow. 
We have only to remember the sensi- 
tiveness, the purity, the affectionate- 
ness, the aspiration of the Manhood 
of Jesus to perceive the acuteness 
and the manifoldness of the Sorrow 
of His whole life. And in the un- 
speakable sadness of His Sacrifice 
the sorrows extended over a lifetime 
seem to be compressed and inten- 
sified ; — the sorrow of temptation 
which, because of His undefiled Soul, 
was more awful to Him than it could 

107 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

be to a sinner ; the sorrow of intel- 
lectual and spiritual loneliness as His 
Soul swelled with thoughts and feel- 
ings not to be uttered because even 
the best and brightest of His friends 
could not bear them then ; the sorrow 
of realizing about Him an atmo- 
sphere of hatred and distrust, when 
His own heart was charged with love 
and faithfulness ; the sorrow of being 
despised and rejected of men, loaded 
with ignominy, repulsed with bitter- 
ness ; the sorrow of an enforced con- 
tact with sin, the thing that He hated 
and loathed, yet the thing that was 
pressed on His attention at every 
turn ; the sorrow of confronting in 
all the beauty of His young Man- 
hood a death most horribly devised 
by the very genius of cruelty; the 
sorrow of beholding His friends be- 
tray Him, deny Him, and desert 
Him, leaving Him to face that 
bloody death, scorned by the Jew, 
scourged by the Gentile. Yes ! 

1 08 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

The Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 
was the sorrow of man ; it was the 
sorrow, greater in degree than ours, 
yet the same in kind, the sorrow of 
our Brother, of our Friend, Who, 
because in His sensitive, holy Hu- 
manity He has explored the pos- 
sibilities of earthly sorrow, can come 
so marvellously into the sacred places 
of our human thought and be to us 
what none else can be. 

But was it only the sorrow of 
man ? Was it not this and also 
more than this ? Yes ! The Sorrow 
of Christ in His Sacrifice was the 
Sorrow of God making Atonement 
for sin. The Sorrow of God? Is 
such a thing possible as the Sorrow 
of God ? Can God be in sorrow ? 
To those whose conception of God 
has been such as to swallow up the 
idea of the Fatherhood in that of the 
Sovereignty, to those who have un- 
consciously lost their sense of the 
Unity of the Godhead by contrasting 

109 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

God with Christ, God as hating man 
and wishing to destroy him, Christ 
as loving man and dying to save 
him, it is difficult to realize the 
Sorrow of God. And we do not 
realize it until we firmly grasp that 
fundamental idea, the Unity of the 
Godhead ; that the love, the tender- 
ness, and the sorrow we find in God 
the Son, must also be in God the 
Father, and that because Christ is of 
the Nature of the Godhead, the 
Sorrow of Christ is the Sorrow of 
God, making Atonement for sin. 
But are there any words competent 
to set forth in any degree a thought 
so vast as the thought of the Sorrow 
of God in the Atonement? There 
would not be were it not for the ful- 
ness with which the Scriptures reveal 
the purpose of God toward man and 
the attitude of God toward sin. But 
through the revelation of those Scrip- 
tures we can, even to some small ex- 
tent, conceive of the Sorrow of God. 

no 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

We behold in it the Sorrow of dis- 
tress for the Fall of man; the Sorrow 
of wrath for the wilfulness of man ; 
the Sorrow of humiliation in bearing 
the curse of sin. 

The Sorrow of God in the Divine 
Sacrifice was the Sorrow of distress 
for the Fall of man. When, in one 
of our human homes, a beloved child 
goes wrong, and, choosing darkness 
rather than light, breaks away from 
parental love, what distress comes to 
a father's, to a mothers heart! And 
if we can suffer so in the failure of 
our dear ones, what must God suffer 
in the falling of the race ? The mea- 
sure of that grief must be the love 
that inspired God's glorious purpose 
for man. When man set himself 
against that purpose he pierced the 
heart of God. And that Sorrow of 
God in the falling of the race was the 
sorrow of an infinite knowledge which 
could foresee the interminable evolu- 
tion of sins results in the human 

in 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

race, the foul and loathsome perver- 
sion of the laws of our being, the 
devilish riot of unchastened desires, 
the doom of heredity, blighting un- 
born generations. Because in Christ 
dwelt the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily, we know that He saw all this, 
felt all this, knew all this, as He lived 
among the fallen race, and then went 
forth to die at the hands of the fallen 
race, bearing upon His Divine Self- 
consciousness a full knowledge of the 
misery sin had caused and yet would 
cause. 

The Sorrow of God in the Divine 
Sacrifice was the Sorrow of wrath for 
the wilfulness of man. The Fall was 
the calamity of the beloved race ; but 
the Fall was also the sin of the be- 
loved race, the wilfulness of wills 
made in the image of Gods will and 
erecting themselves in revolt and 
defiance against the will of God. 
By a moral necessity of the God- 
head, wrath and condemnation are 

112 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

poured upon sin, as an intolerable 
evil in the universe. They which 
commit such things are worthy of 
death. The wrath of God is re- 
vealed from heaven upon all ungod- 
liness of men. And because in Christ 
dwelt the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily, His attitude and feeling 
towards sin and sinfulness as He 
went to His Cross were the atti- 
tude and feeling of Godhead. He 
recognized, as the cause of His 
death, sin, the one thing that God 
hates, and against which His wrath 
is poured out; and as He beheld 
Himself surrounded by a race glory- 
ing in sin, pushing their sin upon 
His notice, flaunting their wilfulness 
in His face, to what marvellous 
proportions rises the tragedy of the 
Atonement, when we see the wrath 
of the Godhead and the meekness 
of the Lamb blending in Christ's 
Soul. 

The Sorrow of God in the Divine 

8 113 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

Sacrifice was the Sorrow of humili- 
ation in bearing the curse of sin. 
He humbled Himself and became 
obedient unto death, even the death 
of the Cross. Oh ! the awfulness 
of that humiliation ! God the 
Righteous bowing down under sin, 
the thing which He hated, and 
receiving upon Himself, as if 
He were a sinner, the curse and 
condemnation of sin. No wonder 
that even God Himself faltered be- 
fore that intolerable humiliation. 
No wonder that Christ, in Whom 
the Godhead dwelt, when He real- 
ized that the hour had come when 
that humiliation under sin must be 
publicly disclosed in the horrors 
of Calvary, that He must drink that 
deadly cup of wrath in the sight 
of men, sank in the darkness of 
the Garden, a sweat of blood break- 
ing from Him, and prayed : " O my 
Father, if it be possible, let this cup 
pass from Me ! " No wonder, when 

114 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

the shame of that humiliation was 
actively experienced in the naked- 
ness of the Cross, it seemed to Him 
that Godhead Itself was blotted out 
as with a cloud, and he cried : " My 
God, m) God, why hast Thou for- 
saken Me!" 

What shall our relation be to the 
Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice? 
Can there be one who, having fol- 
lowed this thought, remains in en- 
tire indifference ? Can there be 
one content to regard this theme 
in a spirit of impassive specula- 
tion, — content to gaze at the Sorrow 
of that Sacrifice with no respon- 
sive emotion, with naught but intel- 
lectual curiosity ? Can there be 
one content to give to the Sor- 
rowing Saviour only sentimental 
pity, one who is not lifted by the 
conception of the Sorrow of God 
to a plane of thought where pity 
dies in awe ? 

Well may one pray for power 
"5 



Sorrow of Christ in His Sacrifice 

to understand what Christ meant 
when He said : " Ye shall drink of 
my cup ; " what an Apostle sought 
when he cried, " That I may know 
Him and the fellowship of His suf- 
ferings." How r can man have a 
fellowship with sufferings that are 
the Sufferings of God ? Only by 
self-abasement in the presence of 
those Sufferings, being crucified 
with Christ by the sacrifice of the 
will, condemning sin in oneself, and 
by faith uniting oneself to Him in 
His Death, that one may be 
raised with Him in His Resurrec- 
tion, to walk with Him in newness 
of life. 



n6 



THE JOY OF CHRIST IN HIS 
SACRIFICE 



117 



Who, for the joy that was set before Him, 
endured the cross, despising the shame. 

Epistle to the Hebrews. 

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
all men unto Me. This He said, signifying what 
death He should die." 

Gospel of St. John. 

Be of good cheer ; I have overcome the world. 

Gospel of St. John. 

When He cometh into the world He saith, 
sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a 
Body didst Thou prepare for me. Then said I, 
Lo, I am come (in the roll of the book it is 
written of me) to do Thy Will, O God. 

Epistle to the Hebrews. 



118 



Chapter V 

The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

We now approach a theme which, 
in the nature of the case, stands in 
close relation to that of the pre- 
ceding chapter. Whatever observa- 
tions we may be permitted to make 
touching the Joy of Christ in His 
Sacrifice, must necessarily rest 
upon the same belief concerning 
the Nature of His Person as that 
which supported us in our study of 
the Sorrow of Christ in His Sacri- 
fice. For the Sorrow of Christ and 
the Joy of Christ are two phases of 
personality revealed in one and the 
same Person. He Who knew the 
sorrow is He Who knew the joy. 
And as the elements of His Sorrow 
were conditioned on the qualities of 

119 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

His Person, as what He suffered 
depends on what He is ; so the 
elements of His Joy are conditioned 
equally on the qualities of His Per- 
son, and the nature of His Joy 
depends on what He is. We have 
already affirmed our belief concern- 
ing the constitution of the Person of 
Jesus Christ, the Mediator. We 
have asked and have answered the 
question, " Who, then, is the Man of 
Sorrows ? " We have replied : " He 
is God, clothed in human nature. " 
We have said (and there is an 
obvious propriety in refreshing our 
memories as to the exact position 
taken) : " The Person of Christ is 
absolutely and necessarily unique. 
Never before was there, never after- 
ward could there be, another Christ. 
He is Alpha and Omega, the Begin- 
ning and the Ending, the First and 
the Last. In Him is our nature 
truly and veritably present, — the 
power to think our thoughts, to 

120 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

know our experiences, to bear our 
griefs, to carry our sorrows. In 
Him is also the Nature of Godhead 
truly and veritably present, the 
eternal love of the Godhead for 
the human race, purposing the glory 
of the human race, sorrowing over 
its downfall ; the eternal righteous- 
ness of the Godhead, moved, by the 
moral necessity of the Being of God, 
with everlasting wrath and antag- 
onism against sin, as an intolerable 
condition in the universe. The 
Person of Christ (such appears to be 
the actual teaching of the Scripture) 
is real Humanity co-existing with 
veritable and unqualified Godhead ; 
His assumption of the humanity is 
not accomplished by His resignation 
of the Godhead. He does not be- 
come man by ceasing temporarily 
to be God ; but in the uninterrupted 
life of His Godhead, He assumed 
once and forever the nature of man, 
carrying it for three and thirty years 

121 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

amidst conditions of humiliation 
consummated in death, and thence, 
onward and eternally, carrying it in 
the power and blessedness of Risen 
Glory." (See Chapter IV.) 

One can well understand how it 
may be difficult for some to join in 
this affirmation of belief who never- 
theless reverence and adore the 
Person of Christ as Divine. The 
difficulty encountered by these minds 
is that of conceiving how Christ 
could be truly man while at the 
same moment truly self-conscious of 
His Eternal Godhead. It seems 
necessary to those feeling this diffi- 
culty to regard Him as having laid 
aside His Godhead when, to quote 
the noble language of the Philippian 
Epistle, " He, being in the form of 
God, counted it not a prize to be on 
an equality with God, but emptied 
Himself, taking the form of a servant, 
being made in the likeness of men." 
" What," it is asked, " can that mean, 

122 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

if not that He emptied Himself of 
His Godhead and became, for the 
time being, merely a man ? " " How," 
it is asked, " can we hold the blessed 
truth of a Christ made like unto His 
earthly brethren, unless we also hold 
that whilst He tarried on the earth 
His humiliation was in the fact that 
He had laid off His Godhead? " 

It can hardly be necessary to point 
out that this view of the Person of 
Christ is far removed from that 
humanitarian view of His Person 
which feels that it has made its ut- 
most concession when it grants Him 
to have been only the loveliest and 
the most godlike of the children of 
men. This humanitarian view is the 
exaltation of a man among his 
fellow-men by his supremacy in 
human virtues ; the other view is 
the humiliation of a God down to 
the rank of men, by His voluntary 
abdication of Godhead. The two 
opinions are as far from one another 

123 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

as is the east from the west. But, 
as one examines without preconcep- 
tions or prejudices the scriptures 
which describe the Person of Christ, 
one sees reasons, lifting themselves 
out of the very Word, and expanding 
above one like the outstretched 
wings of God, why the humiliation 
of Jesus Christ could not have con- 
sisted in the laying off of His con- 
scious Godhead ; why, on the 
contrary, it must have consisted in 
retaining the self-conscious God- 
head and affiliating it, in infinite 
self-abasement, with the nature of 
men. If Jesus Christ is, in fact, 
a Member of the Godhead, can He at 
any time cease, for a season, from 
that existence ? Can the Godhead 
be, in any sense, or in any part of 
its Selfhood, intermittent? If Jesus 
Christ is the Mediator between God 
and man, could He be that without 
uniting in Himself the two natures 

between which He is to mediate ? 

124 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

Could He reconcile man to God, 
could He reveal God to man, by 
ceasing to be God ? But still 
greater and more conclusive reasons 
present themselves. If Christ's 
humiliation consisted in laying off 
His Godhead, in His emptying Him- 
self of Godhead, then it follows that 
through the whole process of His 
mediatorial work on earth, and in 
the very consummation of that work, 
in His Sacrifice, He was deprived of 
all mediatorial and Divine self-con- 
sciousness of the significance and 
value of His own acts. He knew 
not what He did, save as a man 
might know the impulse of self- 
sacrifice. As He hung in that wild 
storm, when the waves of human 
hatred and rejection broke against 
His Cross, did His dormant God- 
head slumber on, unconscious that 
a world was in the very act and 
article of its Redemption ? And, 
greater than all other thoughts, if 

125 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

Christ's humiliation was the laying 
off of Godhead, if His sorrow in 
death is but the dying sorrow of a 
human self-consciousness, then what 
is there in His Sacrifice to constitute 
it an Atonement for the world? 
Wherein, then, does His death differ 
from the death of other heroes? 
Nay ! the humiliation of Christ is 
not the laying off of Godhead, but 
the retaining of Godhead in humil- 
iating association with an inferior 
nature. The Sorrow of Christ is not 
in the temporary suspension of His 
Divine Self-consciousness, but in 
the preservation of that Divine Self- 
consciousness in the presence of 
repugnant and revolting experiences. 
The sorrow of human suffering on 
the surgeon's table is suspended 
when self-consciousness is put to 
sleep by the anaesthetic, but the 
Sorrow of the Divine Sacrifice is not 
suspended in the Person of the Son 

of God by the anaesthetic of renun- 

126 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

ciation in respect of His self-con- 
scious Godhead. His humiliation 
and His Sorrow are in this : all that 
He is He knows Himself to be. And 
through the humiliation of this uri- 
alleviated self-knowledge in the Per- 
son of Christ, consciously active in the 

presence of sin, is the Atonement; 
for the Atonement is an Atonement 
because it is such an actual and 
suffering condemnation of sin on 
the part of God Himself as shall 
satisfy that moral necessity in the 
Nature of God which demands sins 
condemnation ere sin's forgiveness 
is possible. 

While we have thus been dwelling 
on the Sorrow of Christ in His 
Sacrifice, we have come, not merely 
to the threshold, but into the glorious 
heart of our present theme, — the 
Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice. For 
whatsoever in the constitution of 
His Person caused His Sorrow to be 

all that it was, is the same as 

127 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

that which caused His Joy to be all 
that it was, when He set His face 
steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, royal 
and exultant in spirit, as a King 
going to His coronation. We have 
seen that the Sorrow of Christ in 
His Sacrifice was the sorrow of man 
under conditions of supreme humilia- 
tion ; and that it was also the sor- 
row of God making Atonement for 
sin. So may we also affirm : the Joy 
of Christ in His Sacrifice was the 
joy of man under conditions of 
heroic unselfishness; it was also the 
Joy of God in the Redemption and 
the Recovery of a beloved race. 

Perhaps the most suggestive ut- 
terance in the New Testament con- 
cerning the Joy of the Mediator in 
His Sacrifice is that which in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews exhorts us to 
look unto Jesus as u the perfect 
example of that faith which we are 
to imitate." 1 Christ is there de- 

1 Wescott, Ep. to the Hebrews, p. 395. 
128 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

scribed as the One " Who, for the 
Joy that was set before Him, endured 
the Cross, despising the shame." 
The suggestions awakened in the 
mind when it perceives the force of 
that glorious expression, " the Joy 
that was set before Him," are exalt- 
ing and gladdening. Jesus is there 
represented as enduring the Cross 
with noblest dignity, disregarding the 
judgment of men concerning the 
shame of the Cross, because, raised 
in spirit above the common levels of 
human perception, He beheld, set 
before Him, stretched out like a 
sunny landscape before His eyes, 
a vision of results proceeding from 
His Passion, which filled Him with 
joy. And so vast and substantial 
were these results as He realized 
them prospectively from His Cross, 
He was enabled, in the joy of them, 
to endure His sufferings, and to 
triumph even in His humiliation. 
Who can think of the Joy of Christ 

9 129 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

in His Sacrifice without desiring to 
know the sources and the nature of 
that Joy? Where such a desire 
exists, it may to some extent be 
satisfied. Our knowledge of human 
nature on its nobler side permits us 
to understand in some degree the 
Joy of Christ which His Humanity 
knew, and the Scriptures splendidly 
disclose the Joy that entered His 
Self-consciousness of Godhead even 
amidst the humiliation and sorrow 
of the Divine Sacrifice. 

We have said that the Joy of 
Christ in His Sacrifice was the 
joy of man under conditions of heroic 
unselfishness. When we spoke of 
His Sorrow as a Man, a sorrow the 
more exquisitely keen because ex- 
perienced in the purest and finest 
of natures, a sorrow including temp- 
tation ; intellectual and spiritual 
loneliness; the hatred, distrust, and 
rejection of men ; enforced contact 
with sin ; the approach of a hor- 

130 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

rible death, accentuated by betrayal, 
denial, and desertion at the hands 
of His friends, — we perceived how 
these things, by being a part of 
Our Lord's experience, have ac- 
counted for that instinct in ourselves 
which bids us bring Him into places 
in our life too deep, too dark, too 
dreary for others to enter; which 
prompts us to believe that His ex- 
perience of sorrow has comprehended 
our own. The Joy which was set 
before Him in His Sacrifice was 
in part this : that He perceived with 
the delight of heroic unselfishness 
how His sufferings were preparing 
Him an access into human hearts, 
an avenue to their deepest con- 
fidence. To one who deeply loves 
humanity, whose passion is the pas- 
sion of helpfulness, there are mo- 
ments when our suffering, whether 
of mind or body, seems worth all 
it costs, because of the added power 
that comes through it to understand 

131 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

those who suffer, and to gain their 
confidence. Though we may have 
known hours of darkness, hours 
of humiliation, hours when the 
burden of living seemed greater than 
we could bear, who regrets the 
sufferings of those hours, if, by 
means of them, one learned to read 
the secret of humanity's sorrow in 
a way that fitted one to meet hu- 
manity's need ? This was the Joy 
of Christ as a Man, because He was 
a lover of men. In every tempta- 
tion that stung like an arrow in the 
living flesh, in every bitter hour of 
loneliness, in every enforced con- 
tact with sin's revolting conditions, 
in every shock to friendship and 
affront to love, as friend after friend 
denied Him or turned the back and 
fled, in the darkling hour of im- 
pending death, in the last ecstatic 
agony of pain, He, the Lover of 
men, saw but one bond more, bind- 
ing Him closer to humanity; but 

132 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

one pang more, helping Him to 
understand the hardship of life; but 
one claim more upon the affec- 
tion and confidence of His brother- 
men ; and so, for the joy that was 
set before Him, spreading far and 
long like a tender and sun-bathed 
landscape, the joy of winning men 
through sympathy with their con- 
dition, He endured the Cross, de- 
spising the shame. 

But when we remember that in 
the Person of Christ dwelt not only 
the heroic unselfishness of a large 
and loving soul, but also the august 
Self-consciousness of Godhead, it 
is manifest that the Joy of Jesus 
in His Sacrifice is something infi- 
nitely broader and deeper than we 
have yet considered ; for it is the 
Joy of God in the Redemption and 
the Recovery of a beloved race. To 
attempt the faintest delineation of 
that Mediatorial Joy, that Gladness 
of God, apart from the Scriptures, 

*33 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

were indeed perilous, not to say 
presumptuous ; for who hath known 
the mind of the Lord ? But when 
our thought is founded on and 
limited by the Scriptures we may, 
without presumption, rise even to 
the plane of this magnificent con- 
ception, — the Joy of Jesus, as, self- 
conscious of His own Godhead, 
He beheld the purpose of His In- 
carnation attained through Sa- 
crifice. Broader even than the 
measure of man's mind is the 
breadth of this thought. Yet, while 
we cannot comprehend it all, we 
may comprehend some of it. We 
may look, as if with His eyes, upon 
some part of that great landscape 
of Joy which He saw from the 
eminence of the Cross. He re- 
joiced in the doing of the Will of 
the Father. He rejoiced in the re- 
construction of human society. He 
rejoiced in the communication of the 
spirit of victory to individual lives. 

i34 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

He rejoiced in the doing of the 
Will of the Father. If we compre- 
hend the meaning of that state- 
ment, we advance immensely toward 
a right understanding of the Gospel 
of the Divine Sacrifice. And to 
comprehend it is well within our 
power if we use the Scriptures. 
Men have talked wildly of the 
Will of God. But let us learn 
what Jesus tells us of the Will of 
God ; Jesus, Who taught us to pray, 
saying: " Our Father Which art in 
heaven, Thy Will be done on earth 
as it is in heaven." Jesus came 
to do, to further, to accomplish 
the Will of God. So says the 
Scripture : " When He cometh into 
the world He saith : Sacrifice and 
offering Thou wouldest not, but a 
Body didst Thou prepare for Me. 
Then said I, Lo ! I am come (in 
the roll of the Book it is written 
of Me) to do Thy Will, O God." 
The Will of the Father was in 

*3S 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

harmony with the Will of the 
Son. " I and My Father are One," 
says Christ; "I do always such 
things as please Him." There is no 
conflict, no distinction of motives, 
between the Father and Christ. 
The will of the Father is precious 
and acceptable to the Son. " My 
meat," says Christ, is to do the 
Will of Him that sent Me, and to 
finish His Work." Christ is not, in 
His Love, preventing, by sacrifice, 
a malignant Father from carrying 
out His wrathful Will. Christ, in 
His Love, is assisting and enabling, 
by sacrifice, a loving Father to 
carry out His blessed Will. What 
then is the Will of God of which the 
Son says : " Lo, I come to do Thy 
Will " ? Westcott grandly expressed 
it, when he said : " The Will of God 
answers to the fulfilment of man's 
true destiny ; and this, as things 
actually are, in spite of the Fall. 
Christ, as Son of Man, made this 

136 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

Will His own, and accomplished it." 1 
The Will of God is the Eternal 
Purpose and choice on behalf of a 
beloved race that it shall be holy 
and therefore happy. Sin comes 
as a catastrophe, a self-ruin, upon 
the race. But sin, while it calls 
forth God's wrath, has no power 
to change God's Will. Yet sin 
stands in the way of that Will, for- 
bidding its fulfilment. But because 
God is greater than sin, He will 
not have His Purpose blocked by 
sin. His Will shall be done; the 
race having fallen shall be redeemed 
and recovered to an estate where 
the Will of God can be done. We 
have studied the method of Re- 
demption. We have seen that it 
is accomplished by an act of the 
Godhead, prompted wholly by love, 
wherein sin is condemned in the 
sacrifice of One, in Whom dwelleth 
all the fulness of the Godhead 

1 Wescott, Ep. to the Hebrews, p. 311. 
137 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

bodily. The Atonement is, then, 
one stage in the doing of the Will 
of God, the sweeping away of one 
vast obstacle reared in the path of 
that Will by the lawlessness of Satan 
and of man. When sin has been 
condemned in the Divine Sacrifice, 
that stage in the doing of the Will 
is finished, and Christ cries from 
the Cross, "It is finished," and the 
Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice is the 
Joy of God in the advancement, 
to a new stage of fulfilment, in spite 
of the Fall, of the Eternal Will of 
the Godhead for the beloved race. 
When Christ faltered in the garden, 
before the unsupportable humil- 
iation of the Godhead, in being 
brought low beneath the condem- 
nation of sin, when, in that hideous 
contact with evil, He cried : " If it 
be possible let this cup pass from 
Me ! ' then He remembered that 
only thus, only through this pro- 
foundest of all humiliations could 

13* 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

the Will be done, could the con- 
demnation of sin be effected with- 
out the doom of the race ; and 
loving Gods Will for the race 
above all else, He says : " Thy Will 
be done ! ,! Then, when He came 
to the Cross, He saw before Him 
the spectacle of that redeemed and 
recovered race, placed by His own 
obedience to death in a position 
where sin can be forgiven, where 
Gods Will can be done, and re- 
joicing in that thought He endured 
the Cross, despising the shame. 

Christ rejoiced in the reconstruc- 
tion of human society. " I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth, will draw 
all men unto Me." " This He said," 
adds St. John, " signifying what 
death He should die." It seems 
impossible to doubt that the Person 
of Christ contained the Self-con- 
sciousness of Godhead when we 
stand in the presence of such words 
as these : " I, if I be lifted up, will 

139 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

draw all men unto Me." If He were 
indeed emptied of Godhead by His 
Incarnation, so that He spake and 
reasoned but with the foresight of a 
man, then the significance of these 
words, as conceived in His own 
mind, approaches madness. Thus 
to speak of the result of His own 
death seems to involve an almost 
irrational confidence in the charm 
of His personal influence, an almost 
irrational contempt of those great 
time forces which, with the icy calm 
of the relentless glacier, slowly and 
surely override and bury all human 
influence that has not incorporated 
itself either in the literary life or 
in the political life of the world. 
Christ had not deified Himself by 
literary mastership ; He had not 
imperialized Himself by a political 
coup d'etat ; He had nothing where- 
with to hold the world but His pure 
and simple Personality. Could He 
rationally hope still to hold the 

140 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

world when the grave had closed 
over that Personality? Yet He 
says : u I, if I be lifted up from 
the earth, will draw all men unto 
Me." He spoke with the self-con- 
sciousness of Godhead, and so speak- 
ing He beheld, with a joy that made 
even the Cross and its shame des- 
picable, how His Divine Sacrifice 
should become a new centre around 
which a race, disorganized by sin in 
all its thought and motives, might 
rally itself again, and reconstruct a 
new social order on a basis of purity, 
truth, self-sacrifice, and love. He 
saw from His Cross all that we, in 
our day, are seeing ; how, wherever 
Christ is lifted up in all the fulness 
of His Divine Sacrifice, men and 
women are given a new desire to 
break from sin, a new longing to be 
like God, a new tenderness and care 
for one another. He saw what we 
have not yet seen, because the time 

of it has not yet come, — the future 

141 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

magnificence, catholicity, and peace 
of a Messianic Kingdom, where all 
shall know Him from the least to 
the greatest, where all shall be one 
in Him, in the unity of consecration 
and obedience, even as He is One 
with the Father, in the unity of the 
Eternal Godhead. 

Christ rejoiced in the communica- 
tion of the Spirit of Victory to in- 
dividual lives. " Be of good cheer, 
I have overcome the world." Oh ! 
most wondrous of all thoughts, to 
think that He saw, from His Cross, 
all that that Cross should come to 
mean to all who know its power, as 
a sign of Victory ! He saw the weary 
and heavy-laden, toiling with leaden 
feet along the path of life, dis- 
couraged, overwelmed, doubting if 
life be worth the living, chilled by 
human neglect, stung by human 
unkindness, ready to sink; yet in 
that very hour catching sight of 
the Cross, feeling the thrill of its 

142 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

message through their souls, rising 
with new light in the eye, new 
strength in the will, new peace in 
the soul, because the Crucified had 
said : " Be of good cheer, I have 
overcome the world." He saw the 
man, the woman, the child, pressed by 
Satan to the verge of self-abandon- 
ment, caught in the toils and meshes 
of unmentionable temptation, fever- 
ish with conflicting passions, scorn- 
ing self for the desire to yield, yet 
ready to yield because self had been 
scorned and trifled with too often; 
then, on the very verge of failure, 
remembering the Cross and beating 
down Satan under the feet, because 
the Crucified had said : " Be of good 
cheer, I have overcome the world." 
He saw the eyes that wept till there 
were no more tears to shed, the 
broken hearts that envied the dead 
resting in grassy graves, " Far from 
the madding crowd," the empty 
hands and emptier lives that had 

143 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

buried all that kept them busy, all 
that made them want to live ; the 
shattered nerves that had no volition 
to take up life again : yet when 
grief refused to be comforted, when 
misery refused to think of aught 
except itself, the tearless eyes saw 
that Cross, and the broken heart 
resolved to be unselfish in its sorrow 
and to live for others, because the 
Crucified had said : " Be of good 
cheer, I have overcome the world." 
He saw the pallid faces of the dying, 
the thin hands that clung so wist- 
fully to life, the eyes that closed in 
terror at each thought of the advanc- 
ing shadow ; the minds distracted 
with natural dread, conceiving of 
death but as the deafening whirlpool 
that engulfs a struggling wretch ; 
yet when all was darkest and most 
confused, the Cross was held before 
those closing eyes, light came on 
those pallid faces, peace folded those 
clinging hands, rest composed those 

144 



The Joy of Christ in His Sacrifice 

frightened minds, because the Cruci- 
fied had said : " Be of good cheer, I 
have overcome the world ! ' 

Oh! Joyful Christ! Oh! Happy 
Man of Sorrows ! Well might 
Thine Heart exult even as it broke 
upon the Cross ! For what glory 
lay before Thee in Thy death ; — the 
doing of Gods dear Will, the re- 
building of a social order, the com- 
munication of victory to innumera- 
ble souls, — well became it Thee 
to rejoice ; — much was before Thee ! 
" When Thou hadst overcome the 
sharpness of death Thou didst open 
the Kingdom of Heaven to all be- 
lievers. When Thou ascendedst up 
on High, Thou didst lead captivity 
captive — Thou gavest gifts unto 
men ! " 



io i4S 



VI 

THE REJECTION OF THE 
ATONEMENT 



147 



If any man hear My sayings, and keep them 
not, I judge him not ; for I came not to judge the 
world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth 
Me, and receiveth not My sayings, hath one that 
judgeth him ; the word that I spake, the same 
shall judge him in the last day. For I spake not 
from Myself, but the Father which sent Me, He 
hath given Me a commandment, what I should 
say and what I should speak. 

Gospel of St. John. 

All men should honor the Son, even as they 
honor the Father. He that honoreth not the Son, 
honoreth not the Father which hath sent Him. 

Gospel of St. John. 

He that rejecteth Me, rejecteth Him that sent 
Me. Gospel of St. Luke. 

He that believeth on the Son of God hath the 
witness in Him ; He that believeth not God, 
hath made Him a liar; because he hath not 
believed in the witness that God hath borne con- 
cerning His Son. And the witness is this, that 
God gave unto us Eternal Life, and this life is in 
His Son. First Epistle of St. John. 

A man that hath set at naught Moses' Law 
dieth without compassion on the word of two or 
three witnesses : of how much sorer punishment, 
think ye, shall he be judged worthy who hath 
trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath 
counted the Blood of the Covenant wherewith he 
was sanctified an unholy thing, and hath done 
despite unto the Spirit of Grace ? 

Epistle to the Hebrews. 



148 



Chapter VI 

The Rejection of the Atonement 

One who studies the Gospel of 
the Divine Sacrifice must deal with 
the problem of the Rejection of the 
Atonement by the human under- 
standing. The question is raised in 
the New Testament itself, in the 
First Epistle of Peter : " What shall 
be the end of them that obey not 
the Gospel of God ? " For a logical 
mind, there is no escape from that 
question, be the attitude what it may 
toward the Gospel. Every mind 
that hears the Gospel must dispose 
in some way of that which it has 
heard, because the Gospel is an 
appeal to every mind. The person 
addressed may, on the one hand, 
accept, or may, on the other hand, 

149 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

reject, the propositions submitted to 
him in the Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice. In either case he is en- 
titled to his opinion. But every 
mind, whether in the attitude of 
acceptance or of rejection, must face 
the problem of rejection, and must 
reach a conclusion concerning the 
consequences of rejection. The con- 
clusion reached by one may be that 
there are no consequences of im- 
portance attached to the rejection of 
the Atonement; that the Atone- 
ment may be regarded as incredible, 
and as such may be dismissed from 
the mind even as a thousand other 
matters are set aside, without involv- 
ing the life in any present or future 
trouble. The conclusion reached by 
another may be that the Atonement 
is a message from God to man, in- 
volving personal redemption, and 
that he who sets the Atonement 
aside must ultimately reckon with 
God in the position of one who has 

i5° 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

rejected God's message and refused 
God's mercy. These are opposite 
conclusions ; and as a matter of per- 
sonal liberty, each mind is entitled 
to hold whichever conclusion it 
chooses to hold. 

Between two individuals holding 
opposite views on this subject, there 
is no ground for quarrel or dis- 
pute. But neither is there ground 
for complaint if one shall state 
frankly to the other what he believes 
to be involved in the rejection of 
the Atonement. 

For example: It is within the 
power of a free being now and hence- 
forth to reject the Atonement, but 
he not only may not wish to do it, 
because he has found Christ pre- 
cious ; he may not dare to do it, be- 
cause he stands in terror of the 
consequences involved in so doing. 
No just charge of hardness or sever- 
ity can be laid against such a free 
being, if he says what he believes for 

151 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

himself concerning the peril of re- 
jecting the Atonement. Every word 
he may say concerning the outlook 
for those who reject the Atonement 
becomes instantly applicable to him- 
self, if he eventually takes the posi- 
tion of rejection. He is only saying 
frankly to others what he would 
wish another frankly to say to him, 
for the warning and the salvation of 
his soul. We will approach the sub- 
ject in perfect candor, and if we 
feel constrained to carry the sub- 
ject to its conclusions, we will give 
our reasons for entertaining such 
conclusions. 

Before taking up, on their merits, 
the grounds and the consequences 
of rejecting the Atonement, a sense 
of the seriousness of the theme 
requires a definition of the word 
" rejection," and also calls for a 
statement of the authority upon 
which one ventures to speak to 
one's fellow-men of what is involved 

*5 2 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

in this rejection. Every student of 
English knows that the word " re- 
ject " means to "throw away," or 
" to cast from one," or " to discard " 
or " to refuse to acknowledge." 
Through all these shades of mean- 
ing, graded from a violent repudi- 
ation to a more or less calm and 
steady opposition, runs one com- 
mon idea, — the will antagonizing 
a proposition presented to it. Re- 
jection, be it violent or be it calm, 
implies the presentation of a sub- 
ject to the mind, the consideration 
of that subject in the mind, and the 
opposition of that subject by the 
will. A mind incapable, for any 
reason, of considering a subject, 
cannot be described as having re- 
jected it by not having given an 
assent, which it is, in fact, incapable 
of giving. Nor can a mind in 
ignorance of a proposition be said 
to have rejected that proposition 
by not having assented to that of 

i53 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

which it as yet knows nothing. The 
idea of rejecting the Atonement 
is, obviously, limited in important 
ways by these considerations. Mul- 
titudes who have died, or who still 
live in the earth, without giving their 
assent to the Atonement, have never 
rejected it. In many cases they 
were mentally incapable of con- 
sidering it. In many other cases 
they remained in ignorance of 
it. The countless little children 
living in infancy upon the earth, 
or gathered, as we assuredly believe, 
in our Saviour's Presence, did not 
reject that which their undeveloped 
minds had no power to consider. 
The multitudes suffering from men- 
tal disease could not reject that 
which they were incapable of ap- 
prehending. And so, also, of igno- 
rance. The generations of heathen 
races before which the Cross was 
never presented were not rejecters 
of Christ. " How," says St. Paul, 

iS4 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

"shall they believe on Him of 
Whom they have not heard?" and 
we might add, How shall they re- 
ject an Atonement which they have 
not an opportunity to consider? 
And the same must be said of 
ignorance in Christian lands that 
is said of ignorance in heathen 
lands. Every day souls are being 
swept into eternity from these 
Christian cities, whose parentage 
was so depraved, whose mental 
and moral life was so perverted 
through vicious and brutalized or 
infidel inheritance, whose poverty 
was so desperate, whose neighbor- 
hood influences were so foul, they 
never knew enough of the Son of 
God to make an intelligent re- 
jection of Him. They died, as 
they had lived, without God and 
without hope in the world. It is 
no part of our present duty to speak 
of the questions raised by what 
we have just said. To consider 

*55 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

those questions now would be to 
confuse the issue before us. What- 
ever our beliefs or our hopes may 
be concerning the destiny of those 
who through infancy, disease, or 
ignorance have been incapable of 
apprehending on earth the Gospel 
of the Divine Sacrifice, our reason 
and our moral sense compel us to 
see that their relation to God 
differs not in degree only, but in 
kind, from that of those who reject 
the Atonement. Of such are they 
who have had the Gospel of the 
Divine Sacrifice fairly presented 
to their minds, who have intelli- 
gently considered it, on its merits, 
and who reject it by the opposi- 
tion of the will, whether that opposi- 
tion be expressed in terms of violent 
repudiation or in the sustained 
attitude of calm and steady refusal 
to acknowledge. 

On what authority does the in- 
dividual venture to speak to his 

'5* 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

fellow-men of the nature and the con- 
sequences of rejection ? Not cer- 
tainly on the authority of private 
opinion. That, under the circum- 
stances, were an impertinence. Nor 
does he speak on the authority of 
Christian tradition. That, under 
the circumstances, were but to set 
one opinion against another. He 
speaks on the authority which has 
alone been claimed for all that has 
hitherto been said, — the authority 
of the Bible itself as the Word of 
God. 

Upon our findings in that Word 
an attempt has been made to rea- 
son from God's Love as a starting- 
point up to Jesus Christ and Him 
crucified, revealed in the Sorrow 
and Joy of His Sacrifice as the 
Redeemer of the race. Continuing 
to report our findings in the Word, 
it now appears that the Word itself 
goes far beyond the mere affirma- 
tion of the Divine Sacrifice. It 

T 57 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

makes knowledge of the Divine 
Sacrifice a ground of personal re- 
sponsibility,, so that once knowing 
the fact of the Atonement, the man 
becomes involved in moral relations 
toward it from which he cannot 
escape. The reason for this is that 
the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice 
is an appeal to the man, who having 
once heard that appeal addressed to 
himself, must in some manner dis- 
pose of it, either by acceptance or 
by rejection. Christ having offered 
Himself to the man, the man must, 
by the necessity of the case, do some- 
thing with Christ. Every one, be- 
liever and unbeliever alike, should 
therefore, for his own information, 
fairly confront the proposition of re- 
jecting the Atonement, and should 
ascertain, not from contemporary 
human opinion (always tending to 
local fluctuation), but from the same 
unaltered source whence comes our 
knowledge of the Atonement, the 

*S8 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

consequences involved in its rejec- 
tion. 

For those who have long lived the 
life of faith, worshipping Christ as 
God, and viewing His Sacrifice with 
sentiments of adoration, gratitude, 
and affection, it may be difficult to 
understand the grounds on which 
one rejects the Atonement. Never- 
theless, the rejection of the Atone- 
ment is a fact more or less prom- 
inent in intellectual life, and as such 
it is to be reckoned with as we 
reckon with any other fact observed 
in human experience. If it trans- 
pired that the Atonement were re- 
jected only by the uneducated or by 
the depraved, we might conclude 
that education and moral uplift alone 
are needed to bring one into sym- 
pathy with the Cross of Christ. But 
we find, on the contrary, among 
those who reject the Atonement 
minds highly educated, highly philo- 
sophical, highly favorable to morality 

iS9 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

and religion. If, on the other hand, 
we found the Atonement to be re- 
jected by all trained and command- 
ing intellects, and accepted only by 
the lowly and the unlettered, we 
might conclude that the belief is a 
survival of superstition, tending to 
disappear under the growth of knowl- 
edge. But we find, instead, many of 
the noblest minds, leaders of the 
world's progress, holding a faith that 
worships Jesus as Divine and regards 
His Sacrifice as the true ground of 
peace. 

Evidently the causes leading 
individuals to reject the Atonement 
must be sought deeper in the 
consciousness of man. And he who, 
a believer himself, longs to have 
others share this noblest of faiths, 
need not remain in ignorance of 
those deterring causes, if he will 
approach his fellow-men in the spirit 
of sympathetic inquiry rather than 
in that of wholesale condemnation. 

160 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

By some cultured minds and gen- 
erous hearts the Atonement is re- 
jected on grounds of sentiment. 
There are those who faint at the 
sight of blood. It is nature's protest 
against pain and death. Through 
a corresponding intuition the reli- 
gious instinct in some rejects with 
a shudder the death on the Cross. 
It pronounces the horror of the 
Crucifixion incompatible with re- 
ligion. Religion should comfort, 
uplift, inspire ; not horrify the im- 
agination with a vision of stream- 
ing blood and deathly anguish. 
Religion should point man onward 
to paths of moral excellence, should 
feed his intellect, should nourish 
his ambitions ; not turn his eyes 
backward to a far-off scene of 
misery, nor try to humble his pride 
before a distant Cross. And so 
the Passion of Christ is set aside, 
the Witness of the Bible to the 
meaning and value of His Sacrifice 
ii 161 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

is ignored, the relation of God to 
sin is put from the mind, and 
sentiment prevailing alike over 
reason and revelation, soothes itself 
with soft words of peace. 

By some the Atonement is re- 
jected through inertia. Speaking 
in the language of physical science, 
inertia is the tendency of a body 
to continue in its present condition, 
— if at rest to remain at rest, if in 
motion to continue in motion. Too 
readily, under certain conditions, the 
mind becomes inert; ceases from 
the constructive energy of urgent 
thought; wearies of mounting to 
new planes of knowledge, of climb- 
ing to advanced conclusions ; sub- 
mits to stay wherever habit has 
formed its boundaries; learns to 
think in grooves; suffers itself to be 
content with familiar positions. 
And thus, by some, the rejection of 
the Atonement occurs by default It 
is not a part of the ancestral teach- 

162 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

ing; it is not one of the familiar 
ideas; to grasp it demands the 
constructive energy of fresh think- 
ing; to rise to it calls for the strain 
and the push of the mountain- 
climb, up from the beaten track, to 
higher levels and a keener air. 
It is too much. Inertia protests. 
Habit conquers. Christ dies while 
human minds reject His Atonement 
by default, through lack of energy 
to think their way independently 
to rational conclusions. 

By some the Atonement is re- 
jected through a misunderstanding 
of the Bible's position concerning 
it. It is not beyond possibility that 
the Church, in its sincere effort to 
win souls, may at times have 
alienated them from the Cross of 
Christ. Rejection, under such cir- 
cumstances, would be a double 
sorrow ; a sorrow that one soul 
should reject, not the Bible doctrine 
of the Atonement, but some per- 

163 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

version of the Bible doctrine, taught 
in all honesty by a zealous Church ; 
a sorrow that the Church, loyal 
to the Master, and intending to 
honor Him, should unconsciously so 
pervert the Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice that it becomes a stum- 
bling block to minds equally loyal to 
their own ideal of truth, and equally 
intending to honor God. This 
mutual misunderstanding is surely 
the tragedy of faith, a tragedy 
whose pathos is intensified an 
hundred-fold because its centre is 
the Cross of Him Who, in His 
catholic compassion, tasted death 
for every man. Yet it is not easy 
to escape the conviction that some 
have rejected the Atonement under 
mistaken opinions of what the 
Bible doctrine of the Atonement 
is — and that the Church, in her 
very zeal for the honor of God, may 
unhappily have corroborated those 

opinions. The teaching of a limited 

164 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

Atonement, or the Death of Christ 
for only a moiety of the race; and 
the teaching of what must be de- 
scribed as the vindictive Atonement, 
or the Death of Christ as a victim 
to the anger of the Father, may 
have encouraged some truly devout 
minds to reject the Divine Sacrifice 
out of respect for God. The lim- 
ited Atonement may have been a 
stumbling-block to faith. A calm 
review of the history of religious 
opinions leads one to see that the 
Gospel of the Christ may have been 
rejected by some because it was 
impossible for them to believe that 
God had deliberately ordained a 
portion of the race to inevitable sal- 
vation, abandoning all others to in- 
evitable damnation ; and that Christ 
had died for the elect only. Such 
a doctrine of God seemed incom- 
patible with the Morality of His 
Being, yet as the Church appeared 
to insist on that doctrine, the 

165 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

Atonement was set aside, and relief 
was found in a non-evangelical 
theism which allowed the mind free 
expression of its intuitive belief in 
the love of God. On the other 
hand, that which we describe as 
the vindictive Atonement may have 
been a stumbling-block to faith. 
When the Church seemed to insist 
that God the Father was full of rage 
toward man and was wishing to de- 
stroy him, and that Christ the Son, 
full of love, flung Himself between 
God and man and permitted the 
rage to vent itself on Him, so that 
now a pacified God deigns to love 
man ; there were many who could 
not endure that conception of God, 
and rather than submit to it, they 
refused to grant the Godhead of 
Christ. They rejected the Atone- 
ment as an incredible fiction, and, 
taking refuge in Unitarianism, they 
revered Christ as a godlike hero, 

whilst they worshipped the Love 

166 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

of God the Father. We shall never 
know in this world all the spiritual 
stru£Q-le of those who have been 
compelled to withhold allegiance 
from the Catholic Faith, and to en- 
dure the pain of being looked down 
upon as unbelievers because they 
w r ere unable to accept interpreta- 
tions of the Gospel enforced by 
ecclesiastical authority. This sure- 
ly has been the tragedy of faith, 
all the more pathetic because the 
Church has been moved to many of 
her most uncompromising positions 
by the noblest and purest motives. 
She taught the limited Atonement 
that she might exalt the Sovereignty 
of God ; and she taught the Anger 
of God as appeased in the Blood of 
Christ because she desired to em- 
phasize the sinfulness of sin. As 
one thinks of this whole tragedy of 
faith, one's only confort is in God 
Himself. If any soul ever rejected 
the Atonement under an honest mis- 

167 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

apprehension of its meaning, if any 
soul ever set the Atonement aside 
because, as men depicted Christ's 
Sacrifice, it became a barrier against 
God instead of a way to God, we 
know T that He to Whom all hearts 
are open would not judge of one 
who stumbled before an error, as 
of one who set his life obstinately 
against the Truth. 

But when these misunderstandings 
are removed, when the broad doc- 
trine of the Bible opens before us, 
and we see therein Gods Eternal 
plan of love for the race ; sins ca- 
tastrophe coming in to oppose the 
development of that plan, Love pro- 
ceeding to sweep away by Atone- 
ment the barrier in the path of 
that plan ; when we realize that 
the Bible shows us the Atonement 
as the act of the Godhead, ful- 
filled through the Incarnation of 
one of the Members of the God- 
head, Who, out of the pure love of 

168 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

the Godhead for us, endures humilia- 
tion and tastes death, that by the 
condemnation of sin in His own 
Person He may satisfy that moral 
necessity in God's Nature which de- 
mands sins condemnation ere its 
forgiveness is possible ; when the 
Atonement is seen in Bible light, as 
the supreme exhibition of a Father's 
love expressed in the Son, then the 
situation changes as to a man's 
responsibility in the rejection of 
that Atonement. If it be concluded 
that there may be an intrinsic 
reasonableness in rejecting the 
limited Atonement and the vindic- 
tive Atonement ; that one might re- 
ject these interpretations of Christ's 
Sacrifice out of love and reverence 
for God, there remains no such 
reasonableness in the rejection of 
the Bible Atonement. For the Gos- 
pel of the Cross as presented in the 
Scripture neither antagonizes the 
intuition of justice, nor affronts 

169 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

the moral sense. It appeals rather 
in the highest possible way to our 
ideals of glory and love. There is 
nothing to reject, nothing against 
which to find fault, any more than 
one may find fault with love for 
being unselfish. Human instincts 
accept, acknowledge, and rejoice in 
love, and the same instincts lead us 
to accept, to acknowledge, and to re- 
joice in the Atonement as altogether 
beautiful and glorious. 

When, therefore, after compre- 
hending the Bible doctrine of the 
Atonement, and seeing it to be such 
as we have described it to be, a man 
still rejects God in Christ, there 
remain two ways of accounting for 
His rejection of the Atonement. It 
is rejection because of unbelief, or it 
is rejection because of resistance to 
that demand for personal holiness 
which is included in one's acceptance 
of the Atonement. 

What does one mean by rejection 
170 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

of the Atonement because of un- 
belief? Unbelief of what? Unbe- 
lief of the Bible as a Revelation, and 
consequently of those matters re- 
vealed in the Bible, —the plan of 
God's Love, the necessity for sin's 
condemnation, the condemnation of 
sin in the Person of Jesus Christ. 
But one who takes this attitude of 
unbelief may well be asked to con- 
sider the responsibility he assumes 
in rejecting the Bible Atonement 
through unbelief of the Bible. He 
assumes the responsibility of the 
burden of proof. In disbelieving 
the Bible one is fairly bound to 
show cause why the Bible is not 
credible. In order to defend the 
position of unbelief one must prove 
the invalidity and untruthfulness of 
the Bible. If a man can do this, he 
is safe and logical in rejecting the 
Atonement, for the Bible is the only 
source of testimony to the Fact of 
the Atonement. But if he cannot 

171 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

disprove and overthrow the Bible, 
then he who denies the Bible Atone- 
ment (that is, the Atonement as re- 
vealed in the Bible) assumes the 
more serious responsibility of giving 
the lie to God. " He that believeth 
not God," says St. John, " hath made 
Him a liar, because he hath not be- 
lieved in the witness that God hath 
borne concerning His Son ; and the 
witness is this, that God gave unto 
us Eternal Life, and this life is in His 
Son." 

There is another ground on which 
one can reject the Bible Atonement. 
Either he does not believe it (which 
involves the responsibilities just 
considered) or he does not want it. 
He rejects it because it calls for 
personal holiness in those who ac- 
cept it. The carnal mind is enmity 
against God. In the last analysis, few 
perhaps would reject the Atonement, 
except for that which goes with the 

Atonement, the call that we shall be 

172 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

conformed unto Christ's Death by 
dying to sin in our own hearts and 
lives. We do not want to have 
Christ reign over us, not so much 
because we disbelieve Christ, as 
because we like to indulge a sinful 
nature and we hate that crucifixion 
of self which must become a part of 
every holy life. One may here be 
asked to consider what this means, 
— the rejection of the Atonement 
because one does not want the cru- 
cified Christ to reign over one : a 
God humiliating Himself for love 
of man, and a man rejecting the 
humiliation of His God, because he 
cares for the evil things on account 
of which his God was humiliated, 
more than he cares for his God. 

The writer finds it impossible to 
close this chapter without appealing 
to any reader who, whether from in- 
ertia, or from hostility to ecclesiastical 
interpretations, or from settled dis- 
belief, may be withholding from the 

173 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

Gospel of the Cross the allegiance 
of reason, conscience, and will. 

Discriminate between accepting a 
man's interpretation of the Atone- 
ment and believing the Atonement 
itself. If an interpretation of the 
Divine Sacrifice can be suggested, 
better and more Scriptural than that 
which is stated in the foregoing 
pages, by all means adopt it. Reject 
the interpretation if it be unworthy, 
but let not the rejection of the inter- 
pretation include a rejection of the 
Fact. 

The position one assumes in re- 
jecting the Atonement, whether from 
unbelief or from disinclination for 
that holier life required of a believer, 
should be well considered. For by 
such rejection one thrusts from one- 
self the only defence against the 
moral necessity in God's Nature 
which demands the condemnation 
of sin ; and when we consider what 
that defence is, even God's interposi- 

174 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

tion of His own Self, the rejection 
of the Atonement leaves one the 
position of not only rejecting the 
defence, but of insulting the defence, 
despising the goodness and forbear- 
ance of God, and, to use the words 
of the Bible, u treading under foot 
the Son of God." 

The question that rises in the 
future before one who rejects delib- 
erately the Bible Atonement should 
be well considered. The future 
must be met, and Christ said : " The 
word that I speak, the same shall 
judge him in the last day." The 
question that rises in the future is 
this: Will God submit to you, or 
must you submit to God ? God's 
nature requires sins condemnation. 
He must condemn. "If we are 
faithless, He abideth faithful ; He 
cannot deny Himself." Amidst the 
present interests of our life it is 
difficult to grasp this thought of the 
condemnation of sin. Let one 

i75 



The Rejection of the Atonement 

ask oneself, Do I really believe in 
the condemnation of sin ? The 
condemnation of sin involves the 
condemnation of persons. Why ? 
Because sin is not something apart 
from personality; sin is a condition 
of personality, sin is a state of being. 
Unless, therefore, one will unite one- 
self to the Sin-Bearer by a living 
faith, disowning sin, and, with Christ, 
dying unto sin, one must bear one's 
own burden, here and hereafter. 
Such seems to be the New Testa- 
ment teaching. The Atonement 
conceived in the Heart of Godhead, 
and consummated through the an- 
guish of Christ, cannot be rejected 
with impunity. 



176 



VII 

THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN SUFFER- 
ING CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT 
OF THE DIVINE SACRIFICE 



12 



177 



And God saw everything that He had made, 
and behold, it was very good. Book of Genesis. 

Man that is born of a woman is of few days 
and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a 
flower, and is cut down ; he fleeth also as a 
shadow, and continueth not. Book of Job. 

The wages of sin is death, but the free gift 
of God is Eternal Life in Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. Epistle to the Romans. 

In this was manifested the Love of God 
towards us, because that God sent His Only 
Begotten Son into the world that we might 
live through Him. First Epistle of St. John. 

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God 
of all comfort, Who comforteth us in all our 
afflictions, that we may be able to comfort them 
that are in any affliction, through the comfort 
wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 
For as the sufferings of Christ abound unto us, 
even so our comfort also aboundeth through 
Christ. Second Epistle to the Corinthians. 

When we were come into Macedonia our 
flesh had no relief, but we were afflicted on 
every side : without were fightings, within were 
fears. Nevertheless, He That comforteth the 
lowly, even God, comforted us. 

Second Epistle to the Corinthians. 

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth ; 
and God shall wipe away every tear from their 
eyes ; and death shall be no more, neither shall 
there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more ; 
the first things are passed away. And He That 
sitteth on the Throne said : Behold, I make all 
things new. 

The Revelation of St. John the Divine. 



178 



1 Chapter VII 

The Problem of Human Suffering 
considered in the Light of the 
Divine Sacrifice 

No one who reflects upon the 
intricacy and the mystery of all 
life is surprised to find dark prob- 
lems surrounding the condition and 
the destiny of man. The absence of 
such problems would be a greater 
mystery than their presence. Man's 
finiteness broadens out on every side 
toward God's infiniteness, and life's 
mystery is also life's majesty. 

One of the darkest problems sur- 
rounding the condition of man is the 
problem of Human Suffering. Dis- 
appointment, unrest, sorrow, sick- 
ness, trouble, death, are everywhere. 
Wherever man goes, suffering goes, 

179 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



i & 



lying, as it were, in ambush for him. 
It matters not what man's errand 
may be, the best or the worst, suffer- 
ing awaits him. He may go out 
into life as the teacher, the com- 
forter, the missionary, the friend, — 
or he may go as the destroyer, the 
robber, the seducer, the knave — go 
how he will, and for what he will, 
he suffers, he sorrows, he dies. 
Such is the omnipresence of human 
suffering, of this dark enigma of 
sorrow. One may say of it as the 
Psalmist said of God : " Whither 
shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I 
take the wings of the morning and 
dwell in the uttermost parts of the 
sea, even there shall Thy hand lead 
me. If I say, Surely the darkness 
shall cover me, the darkness hideth 
not from Thee, the darkness and the 
light are both alike to Thee." Who 
can travel so far, who can protect 
himself so thoroughly, who can se- 
clude himself so profoundly that he 

180 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

shall escape from trouble and sorrow 
and pain and death ? 

That man forever attempts to 
solve this dark problem of human 
suffering, to give some rational ac- 
count of this stern condition in- 
separable from his life, is the result 
of an original intuition of man's 
nature. Involuntarily we tend to 
trace all sensations to their source. 
Walking in spring-time through 
some hollow lane of Devonshire, 
we catch the waft of violets, and lift 
the eyes to note the bank, purple 
with bloom. Standing in sunlight 
we see a shadowed form outlined 
on the path beside our own, and turn 
to identify the friend who has joined 
us. Tortured with some strange 
pain shooting through the head or 
clutching at the heart, we go to the 
physician to learn what lesion is its 
cause. This is intuitive inquiry into 
the causes of sensations. And the 
same intuition prompts man to solve 

181 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



& 



the problem of the universal hu- 
man sorrow. It is incredible that 
rational beings involved in suffering 
shall not try to find out why they 
suffer. 

Invariably when man confronts 
the problem of suffering he uses his 
doctrine of God to aid him in the 
solution. The history of human 
thought in all times and in all re- 
ligions will, it is believed, be found to 
verify this statement. By a compan- 
ion intuition to that which prompts 
man to ask why he suffers, man is 
prompted to feel that God is in some 
way related to his sufferings. This 
would be true in the case of an 
atheist, if there exists such a state 
of mind as pure atheism. The 
atheist, denying the existence of 
God, would thereby relate the con- 
ception of a God negatively to 
human suffering, saying : " There 
being no God, the God-idea has no 
bearing whatever on the sufferings 

182 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

of the human race." This would be 
true in the case of the agnostic, who 
declines to commit himself to a posi- 
tive statement of belief on the sub- 
ject of God. He would relate God 
tentatively to human trouble, saying: 
" He may send it, or He may not; 
in the absence of physical demon- 
stration it is impossible to tell." 
This would be true in the case of 
the ethnic religions ; for example, in 
the case of Zoroastrianism, the 
ancient Persian faith, with its dual- 
ism, — two co-eternal gods, arrayed 
against one another in ceaseless 
opposition touching man's condition. 
There is Ormuzd, the god of good, 
sending every blessing on the race ; 
there is Ahriman, the god of evil, 
showering upon humanity woe, dis- 
appointment, and every form of ill. 
These illustrations might be indefi- 
nitely multiplied, and in each case 
we would discover the tendency of 
the human mind to place a doctrine 

183 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

of God in some relation, negative, 
tentative, or positive, to the problem 
of suffering. The reason for this is 
plain ; the sufferings of the race are 
so tremendous, so unceasing, and in 
innumerable instances so out of pro- 
portion to any recognized standard 
of justice, there is a feeling too deep 
for analysis, too axiomatic to call for 
demonstration, that in some way, if 
there is a God, humanity's one hope 
of present consolation or of future 
relief must connect itself with Him, 
and be evolved through Him. Deep 
down below all creeds, the hope of a 
suffering world utters that many- 
sided, infinite syllable " God," and 
feeling the problem of suffering to 
be greater than man can handle 
alone, confesses, sometimes scarce 
knowing what it means : " To whom 
shall we go but unto Thee ! " 

When we confine our thought to 
our own religion, and ask in what 
manner believers in Christianity have 

184 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



'£> 



brought the doctrine of God to bear 
upon the problem of human suffer- 
ing, we behold rising before us that 
tremendous and venerable concep- 
tion of an Infinite One, Whose right 
no one may dispute, Who has fore- 
ordained whatsoever comes to pass, 
Whose Hand is in all things, Who 
for His own glory, and in the exer- 
cise of His own sovereignty, has 
sent and will send whatever comes 
to man. As the mighty peak of 
Teneriffe rises in imperial majesty 
out of the Southern Ocean, and 
sweeps upward twelve thousand feet 
into the glittering sunshine, ancient, 
motionless, solid, symmetrical, silent, 
sharp, white, barren ; while around 
it on every hand stretches the waste 
of the troubled sea, with the swelling 
of its tides, and the moaning of its 
surge, and the ghastly secrets of its 
depths, and the interminable up- 
lift of short-lived billows, rising in 
momentary light, to sink again in 

185 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

darkness, — so rises this metaphysi- 
cal conception of the imperial sov- 
ereignty of God into the highest air 
of abstract thought, in infinite self- 
removal from the actual level of the 
world's experience and the worlds 
intuitive sense of need. Behold 
it, poised in glittering majesty, a 
conception of God, ancient, motion- 
less, solid, symmetrical, silent, sharp, 
barren, a peak of thought, standing 
alone, the solitary goal of a few ex- 
plorers ; a God who, from His eagle 
eyrie, looks down on a world where 
all things happen as they were 
ordained, where evil that might be 
stopped is infinitely permitted, and 
sorrow that might be spared is in- 
finitely sent. The troubled sea of 
human lives moans and heaves about 
that silent peak of God ; millions of 
lives, like waves, lift themselves up 
toward it in momentary hope, and 
sink away into the mass; and deep 
in the heart of the sea of human life 

186 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

are secrets of death which no sun- 
light ever reaches, no tide ever 
sweeps away, no voice from the 
barren peak ever explains. 

It may seem both idle and pre- 
sumptuous for one man to question 
that ancient and deep-seated concep- 
tion of God's relation to human 
suffering, as if one were to stand 
before the peak of Teneriffe and 
say, " Be thou removed, and be thou 
cast into the sea." Nevertheless, a 
man's faith has Christ's guarantee, 
even when it attempts to remove 
mountains. But if that mountain 
were never removed, if the prevail- 
ing belief of Christians were to con- 
tinue to oe what it has so long 
been, it is, not a right only, but a 
duty, to show how one who loves 
and reverences the Bible as Divine 
may start with the pure and simple 
teachings of that Word and reach 
conclusions as far removed from 
those just described as the lofty head 

l8 7 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



^ 



of Teneriffe is from the moaning, 
restless waves that fling themselves 
eternally against its base. Far be it 
from the writer to question any man's 
right so to relate God to the problem 
of human suffering as may best 
relieve the pressure of that problem 
upon his own mind. It is well if 
through such a belief as has just 
been depicted any who suffer are 
being comforted; but there are 
other possible conclusions concern- 
ing God's relation to suffering, 
which appear when, as now, an 
attempt is made to consider that 
problem in the light of the Divine 
Sacrifice. 

Those who have followed the ar- 
gument through the six preceding 
chapters will perceive the bearing 
upon the subject of human suffering 
of what has been said about the 
causes and conditions of Christ's 
sufferings. We are conducted to 
our present theme by the tendency 

188 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

of our previous reasonings. Com- 
prehensive thought upon the Divine 
Sacrifice must lead the mind ulti- 
mately to consider God's relation to 
human suffering in the light of that 
Sacrifice. Furthermore, intuition 
prompts us, as we have already re- 
marked, to bring our doctrine of 
God to bear upon our doctrine of 
suffering, in the hope that the 
glory and the joy of the one may 
relieve the gloom and the stress of 
the other. 

The belief that God sends trouble, 
that the calamities and miseries, 
the pangs, losses, and death of the 
children of men are in a mysterious 
way according to His Will, is a 
belief repugnant to our natural 
sensibilities. It can only be held, 
in connection with love toward God, 
by the aid of a strong and submis- 
sive faith, inasmuch as it violates 
our instinctive conception of what 

love will do. The belief that a 

189 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



<D 



God of perfect love and tenderness 
is causing directly or by indirection 
the grievous sufferings of the human 
race, and is daily adding to the sum 
of sorrow many thousands of freshly 
afflicted hearts, can be sincerely em- 
braced only by an heroic effort of 
faith holding in check our natural 
inclinations to the contrary view. 
Yet beyond question multitudes have 
succeeded in this effort of faith, 
and have loved God while looking 
upon Him as the sender of their 
trouble. Some of the most im- 
pressive and majestic exhibitions of 
the loyalty of faith ever witnessed 
have come from saintly souls, quiver- 
ing with the anguish of earthly sor- 
rows, yet looking in their agony up 
to God, as the One Who sent the 
bereavement, or the maiming, or the 
disgrace, or the sudden poverty ; 
and taking the blow without a mur- 
mur, supposing it to be a just rebuke 

administered by Himself. An ex- 

190 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



£> 



planation of this phenomenon, of 
a religion that develops a doctrine 
of God in antagonism to those in- 
tuitions of God which He has im- 
planted in us, may perhaps be found 
in that form of stating the doctrine 
of God's Sovereignty which has 
prevailed since a very early time. 
To the peculiarities of this form of 
statement we have referred at length 
in earlier chapters. Its two most im- 
portant peculiarities are these : that 
the anger of God against man has 
only been appeased by the bloody 
Sacrifice of the innocent Christ : 
that by a decree of election which 
determines destiny, and by a limited 
Atonement, God has reserved a por- 
tion of the race unto an inevitable 
salvation, leaving the remainder of 
the race unto an equally inevitable 
damnation. 

These are leading ideas in that 
ancient mode of stating the Divine 
Sovereignity which has prevailed cen- 

191 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



& 



tury after century, often accompanied 
with extreme intonations of fierce- 
ness and threatening. Generation 
after generation has been told by its 
teachers that God is angry with 
man, and was on the point of eter- 
nally damning man, when Christ, 
the heroic, innocent Sufferer, in- 
terposed, and by His freely given 
blood, slaked the fierceness of the 
wrath of God. Generation after 
generation has been told by its 
teachers that God, for the purpose 
of demonstrating His Sovereignty, 
singles out some by a decree unto 
life, abandoning all others unto end- 
less hell ; and that Christ died not 
for all men, but for the moiety of the 
race predestined unto life. These 
teachings, urged continuously and 
solemnly upon successive genera- 
tions, and handed down reverently 
from fathers to children, become 
not only the substantial and unques- 
tioned substance and fibre of faith, 

192 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

but develop necessarily just such a 
doctrine of sorrow as we find to 
be so widely and so submissively 
held : that all things are from God, 
that evil not positively sent is neg- 
atively permitted, amounting there- 
by to the same thing; that woes 
and miseries, as well as all other 
human experiences, are parts of 
His Will, and in accordance with 
His Plan under that eternal decree 
which, from before the foundation 
of the world, necessitated all that is. 
This is the reasonable conclusion 
from the existing premises ; and the 
fact that man is God's child and 
made for God, and that man cannot 
live without God, is nowhere more 
marvellously shown than in the mag- 
nificent loyalty with which suffering 
souls have clung to God in the face 
of a doctrine of God's Sovereignty 
which teaches them that He is 
raining the blows of trouble upon 
them. 

13 193 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



£> 



The writer distinctly disavows all 
intention and desire to oppose the 
views just indicated, and the vener- 
ated Confession upon which they are 
founded. On the contrary, he re- 
gards that Confession as a sacred 
monument of the Christian Faith, 
honored of God throughout many 
generations. 

But for the sake of those who can- 
not accept this mode of stating the 
Sovereignty of God, and who, rather 
than believe it, would turn from God 
and wander out into the darkness of 
agnosticism, staggering under life's 
intolerable weight of trouble, it is the 
reverent and humble purpose of this 
book to suggest an alternate doctrine 
of God, which leads to an alternate 
doctrine of sorrow, when the problem 
of human suffering is viewed in the 
light of the Divine Sacrifice. The 
starting-point of all our thought in 
this matter is that the Atonement is 
not the cause of God's Love, but 

194 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

that Gods Love is the cause of the 
Atonement. God's eternal attitude 
toward man is Love, the love of a 
father for his child. This love 
was formulated in Gods Mind be- 
fore the foundation of the world, in 
that Plan for a beloved race that we 
should be conformed to the Image 
of His Son. Into the world came 
man ; godlike, beautiful, holy ; wear- 
ing, as the very diadem of individual- 
ity, the inalienable power of choice. 
And God saw all that He had made, 
and behold it was very good. To 
man in his splendid innocency and 
in his godlike freedom came the 
tempter, himself the outcome of a 
moral tragedy older than man, and, 
working on the unfallen will of the 
new race, with arts and influences 
second only to the power of God 
Himself, the tempter drew the hu- 
man will into choices contrary to 
the Will of God. Thus entered sin, 
the principle of disorganization, con- 

*95 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

fusion, and catastrophe ; blighting, 
weakening, cursing all life every- 
where ; working out, under the per- 
petual misuses of law, the infinitudes 
of sorrow, pain, disease, weariness, 
death. How soon had the scene 
changed ! Out of the prehistoric 
book of Job comes the grievous la- 
ment over a fallen race : " Man that 
is born of a woman is of few days 
and full of misery. He cometh up 
as a flower, and is cut down. He 
fleeth also as a shadow, and con- 
tinueth not." 

The Heart of God was full of grief 
as His beloved ones demeaned them- 
selves in His Presence, and spurned 
their birthright before His Face. 
Yet in His Heart never failed nor 
wavered that great Plan of love for 
humanity. He yearned to forgive 
and to restore. Yet forgiveness and 
restoration could not come without 
sacrifice ; for the moral necessity of 
His own Nature demanded the con- 

196 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

demnation of sin ere it could be for- 
given. He could not be indifferent 
to sin ; He could not consent to sin ; 
He must, by the moral necessity of 
His own Nature, condemn sin as an 
intolerable condition in the universe, 
an intolerable interruption of His 
Plan for the beloved race. And 
the Atonement is the means devised 
by Divine Love to meet the moral 
necessity of Divine Holiness. The 
Atonement is the act of the God- 
head. Christ is God in the flesh of 
man, and as a Member of the God- 
head, enduring the condemnation of 
sin in His own Person as the Repre- 
sentative of the race ; offering His 
Sacrifice for the whole world without 
respect of persons, and so satisfying 
the demand of God's Holiness that 
sin be condemned ere sin can be 
forgiven. We have pondered both 
the Sorrow and the Joy of Christ in 
His Sacrifice. We have seen His 
Sorrow, as He viewed sin's hideous 

197 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



& 



consequences in human life, and, 
with Divine hatred of sin, condemned 
it as the devilish cause of human woe, 
and the devilish impediment in the 
path of God's illustrious Plan of love 
for the race. We have seen His 
Joy, as He felt Himself, through 
His own sufferings and humilia- 
tions, brought into closest fellowship 
with all human suffering, and into 
deepest comprehension of all hu- 
man need. He looked from the 
eminence of His Cross to the far- 
reaching results of His Sacrifice: 
the furtherance of Gods eternal 
Plan for the glory and happiness of 
man ; the reconstruction of human 
society on a new basis of sympathy, 
purity, and aspiration ; the ultimate 
victory of light over darkness, of joy 
over sorrow, of good over evil ; the 
coming of a millennial kingdom, 
when the vestiges of the old catas- 
trophe of sin and death shall at last 
be done away for all who are united 

198 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



■£> 



to Himself, and when for them there 
shall be death no more, neither sor- 
row, nor crying, nor pain, and God 
shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes. 

This is our alternate doctrine of 
God. Thus, assuming the Inspira- 
tion of Scripture and the Godhead 
of Christ, we interpret the Gospel of 
the Divine Sacrifice, self-consistent 
in the eternal past, in the mysterious 
present, in the glorious future : Jesus 
Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, 
and forever; revealing God as the 
Lover of man, the Sacrifice for man, 
the Redeemer of man, the Comforter 
of man, the Restorer to man, at last, 
of that long-lost birthright of power 
and peace, marred through many 
generations by sin and sorrow. 

In the light of this Divine Sac- 
rifice we now view the problem 
of human suffering ; and lo ! the 
conditions of that problem are 
wondrously altered. The suffering 

199 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

is the same, but the problem is 
changed. The darkest enigma hov- 
ering over human suffering van- 
ishes when we believe that all is as 
it is, not because God wills it, but 
because the blessed Plan He willed 
for the world is thrust aside by 
mans perversity. The trouble that 
in a thousand forms fills the world 
to-day is the melancholy harvest of 
generations of weakening tendencies, 
mistaken ideas, sinful propensities, 
and foolish choices, complicated by 
the added errors of each new day of 
life. Awful as that harvest is, one 
can yet look upon it without de- 
spair in the light of the Divine 
Sacrifice. For the Face that we see 
upon the Cross is not the face of 
him that wrought this confusion 
and wreaked this misery ; it is not 
the face of the enemy that sowed 
the tares of evil amid the wheat of 
good; it is the Face of Him Who 
loved us and gave Himself up for 

200 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

us ; the Face of Him Who, foras- 
much as the children of men were 
partakers of flesh and blood, Him- 
self also took part of the same, that 
through death He might destroy 
him that hath the power of death, 
that is ? the devil ; the Face of Him 
Who bore our griefs and carried 
our sorrows ; the Face of Him That 
sitteth on the Throne and saith : 
" Behold, I make all things new." 
And as we look upon that won- 
drous Face, marred then with sor- 
row, radiant now with victory, we 
attribute not to Him any share in 
causing the sufferings of the race 
for which He died ; we soil not the 
lustre of His Name by involving it 
with distresses which are, directly or 
indirectly, the outcome of our sinful 
estate. " The wages of sin is death, 
but the free gift of God is eternal life, 
through Jesus Christ our Lord." 

Does God send trouble? Fear 
not to ask and to answer that ques- 

201 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

tion when you confront the dark 
mystery of human suffering. But 
ask it and answer it in the light of 
the Divine Sacrifice. Answer it 
not in the presence of those start- 
ling acts of judgment recorded in 
the Old Testament Annals, lest you 
be drawn by local conditions far out 
of touch with God's essential rela- 
tion to man. Those Old Testament 
acts of judgment were the heroic 
measures by which He roused to 
moral consciousness His beloved 
race when it had sunk to that abyss 
of degradation of which St. Paul 
speaks in the first chapter of Ro- 
mans, when the very sense of right 
and wrong had vanished into insen- 
sibility., and could only be resusci- 
tated through shocks of judgment. 
Take not those peculiar conditions 
as your standard of inquiry in answer- 
ing the question, Does God send 
trouble ? And answer not that ques- 
tion by observations made along the 

202 



Suffering and Sacrifice 



£> 



narrow groove of your personal 
affairs, lest the snare of a perverted 
doctrine of Providence capture you, 
and you conceive of troubles and 
worries springing from evident phys- 
ical causes as petty persecutions from 
God to drive you into the way of 
righteousness. Ask the question, 
Does God send trouble ? as you 
stand before the Cross of Jesus 
Christ, as you worship Him in His 
Godhead, as you realize that His 
Humiliation is the supreme expres- 
sion of God's hatred for sin, as dis- 
obedience in its essence and as 
sorrow and misery in its results ; 
ask it at the Cross, and an answer 
will be given you out of the depths 
of the Divine Sacrifice, to make 
you sure that He Who died to re- 
deem the race is not he who by 
trouble and sorrow is making men 
old before their time, and breaking 
women down with hardship and 

anguish. 

203 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

But when you have asked and 
answered that question, Does God 
send trouble ? ask and answer an- 
other, — that you may have peace 
in your soul toward God, — even 
this : Does God permit trouble ? 
Surely he who permits the evil he 
might avert does not remove him- 
self far in our thought from him 
who sends the evil. Fear not to 
ask, then, even this question in the 
light of the Divine Sacrifice : Does 
He permit the evil and trouble 
which are riding rough-shod over 
human lives to-day ? To permit ! 
What is it to permit? It is to con- 
sent to, to grant license or liberty 
to do. And must we stand before 
the Cross of Jesus Christ, knowing 
that the sorrows of the world are 
directly or indirectly the wages and 
fruits of sin, and say that God gives 
His consent to these sorrows and 
troubles by licensing the causes that 
produce them? Say it if you must. 

204 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

Many saintly souls have said it, 
and say it to-day. Some cannot say 
it. For them, is there not another 
answer, even this, to the question, 
Does God permit trouble? No! 
He is against it as He is against 
the causes from which it springs. 
Why then does it exist ? Because 
man is free, and his freedom is the 
one thing God cannot take away 
from him. He gave him the free- 
dom of his volition as an inalienable 
and constitutional gift, when He 
gave him his being ; and it is mans 
misuse of his freedom that makes 
this world a world of sorrow. It can- 
not be otherwise until man is sub- 
dued in his will to God. It cannot be 
otherwise until each member of the re- 
deemed race shall have consecrated 
his personal will to Him Who gave 
it. For those who may never do 
this, there remains the eternal possi- 
bility of producing trouble and sor- 
row ; this possibility makes hell on 

205 



Suffering and Sacrifice 

earth, and while this possibility re- 
mains, if earth were blotted out, hell 
would still be left. For those whose 
wills are given to God, at last there 
shall be deliverance from all evil, — 
not on earth, but afterward, — where 
there cannot enter aught that defileth 
or maketh a lie; where the limita- 
tions of earth are left behind; where 
the eyes of the blind are opened, 
and the feet of the lame are healed; 
where the inhabitant shall no more 
say "I am sick;" where death shall 
be no more ; where there shall be 
neither mourning nor crying nor 
pain any more ; where the wicked 
cease from troubling, and the weary 
are at rest ; where God is seen at 
length in His Beauty, that Perfect 
Beauty of Perfect Love, which, on 
earth, we were sometimes slow of 
heart to believe. 



206 



VIII 

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



207 



And I heard as it were the voice of a great 
multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and 
as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying : 
"Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reign- 
eth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor 
to Him. 

The Revelation of St. John the Divine. 

Thou hast put all things in subjection under 
His Feet. For in that He put all in subjection 
under Him, He left nothing that is not put under 
Him. But now we see not all things put under 
Him. 

Epistle to the Hebrews. 

For He must reign till He hath put all His 
enemies under His Feet. The last enemy that 
shall be abolished is death. For He put all 
things in subjection under His Feet. 

First Epistle to the Corinthians. 



208 



Chapter VIII 

The Sovereignty of God 

From all the many Scriptures 
which dwell on the Sovereignty of 
God, it would be difficult to select 
one more splendidly representative 
than that from the Vision of St. 
John in which he declares : " And 
I heard as it were the voice of a 
great multitude, and as the voice of 
many waters, and as the voice of 
mighty thunderings, saying: Alle- 
luia, for the Lord God Omnipotent 
reigneth. Let us be glad and re- 
joice and give honor to Him." 
This is a prophecy of the celestial 
Te Deum, of that final and most 
mighty canticle which shall ring 
through eternity when God is truly 
seen and truly understood by the 

H 209 



The Sovereignty of God 

mind of man. This New Testa- 
ment prophecy is Humanity's ac- 
knowledgment of God's Sover- 
eignty — not God's proclamation of 
it, but Humanity's voluntary ac- 
knowledgment of it. Man is to 
pour out alleluias in Heaven be- 
cause an Omnipotent God is on 
the Throne. 

The spontaneous popular acknowl- 
edgment of sovereignty is, even to 
a republican mind, an impressive 
and thought-awakening spectacle. 
Some never read these words of St. 
John about the voice of the great 
multitude like the voice of many 
waters and of mighty thunderings, 
without recalling the hour in which 
they saw Queen Victoria proceed to 
the Abbey to give thanks to God 
for fifty years of sovereignty. Four 
millions of her subjects lined the 
route of that stately procession. 
Not a note of martial music stirred 
the air as the earthly sovereign went 

2IO 



The Sovereignty of God 

in silence to bow before the King of 
kings ; but as she came along the 
way, from afar her coming was 
heralded by a sound the like of 
which one may not expect to hear 
twice in a lifetime. It was the 
shoutings and applaudings of mil- 
lions ; and as that strange, unearthly 
torrent of sound swept down the 
gorgeous highway, beneath a thou- 
sand banners fluttering from the red 
Venetian masts, one could without 
irreverence think of it as a type of 
St. Johns great vision of Humanity's 
final acknowledgment of the Sover- 
eignty of God, the spontaneous testi- 
mony of consenting voices, like the 
surf of oceans, or thunders from the 
purple cloud : " Alleluia, for the 
Lord God Omnipotent reigneth." 

St. John's Vision is also the ac- 
knowledgment of God's Sovereignty 
by man at the highest stage of 
human development. This is the 
heavenly Alleluia; man's highest 

211 



The Sovereignty of God 

view of God. It is a declaration 
that man's belief in Gods Sover- 
eignty is not the product of igno- 
rance and superstition ; not an idea 
of the Dark Ages, a glorious fable 
fading out into the light of common 
day as science advances and as 
physical laws are better understood ; 
but rather that this thought of the 
reign of an Omnipotent God, a 
thought as old as humanity, is con- 
firmed by every advance of knowl- 
edge's strengthened in the conscious- 
ness of each succeeding age, as the 
race ascends toward its final destiny ; 
and becomes in heaven, where man 
is at his best, the foundation of the 
highest thought and the confession 
of the final faith. The Sovereignty 
of God is the Creed of Glorified 
Humanity : " Alleluia, for the Lord 
God Omnipotent reigneth." 

St. Johns Vision is also the ac- 
knowledgment of God's Sovereignty 
when earth s confused story shall be 

212 



The Sovereignty of God 

ended, and when humanity shall 
look back upon the earth-history 
from the vantage-point of a superior 
state of being. Earth's history has 
been such an inextricable web of con- 
fusion from the beginning, such a 
chaos of evil and good, of hideous- 
ness and holiness, of barbarity and 
blessedness, men have had many 
minds about the power of God. 
Some have swung to the atheistic ex- 
treme, and have said in their hearts : 
There is no God. Some have 
swung to the fatalistic extreme, and 
have said : There is nothing but 
God, for all that comes to pass in 
the earth of every sort is the Will of 
God the Sovereign. Some have 
stood between the two extremes, 
hesitant or stupefied in the presence 
of life's colossal contradictions, not 
knowing what to believe, what 
to disbelieve; afraid of faith, and 
equally afraid of doubt. But one 
rejoices in the Vision of St. John as 

213 



The Sovereignty of God 

an aid to faith, in that it shows a 
view of God which shall ultimately 
prevail in the mind of man. When 
man shall reach the point in the 
future whence he can look back on 
what now seems to him the utterly 
confused history of time; when he 
shall read, not one torn fragment of 
a page in the great book of human- 
ity's world-chronicle, but the whole 
vast tome from cover to cover; when 
" earth breaks up and* heaven ex- 
pands," and man's intelligence studies 
God with eyes no longer dimmed by 
tears and blurred by mists, — the 
Sovereignty of God shall be acknowl- 
edged with an unanimity that shall 
sound before the Throne like the 
break of waves and the peal of 
thunder. " Alleluia, for the Lord 
God Omnipotent reigneth ! " 

And yet once more : this is not 
only the acknowledgment of the 
Sovereignty, but the acknowledg- 
ment that the Sovereignty is a 

214 



The Sovereignty of God 

reason for gladness and rejoicing; 
that the Sovereignty of God is not 
tyranny, not cold, impenetrable fate, 
not the Kismet of Islam, beneath 
which conduct becomes submission 
to the inevitable ; but a Sovereignty 
that stimulates to love and happi- 
ness and worship, that fills heaven 
with delight, and eternity with free- 
dom. " Alleluia, for the Lord God 
Omnipotent reigneth. Let us be 
glad and rejoice, and give honor to 
him." Thus does St. John's Vision 
reveal a conception of the Sover- 
eignty of God upon which every 
mind can look with delight. 

Undoubtedly the Sovereignty of 
God is one of the root ideas of our 
religion, and of that Hebrew faith 
which is, chronologically, the parent 
stock of Christianity. The infinite- 
ness of the Power of God, His 
eternal and inalienable seat upon 
His Throne, His authority over all 
things, visible and invisible, is at 

215 



The Sovereignty of God 

the very foundation of worship. 
And nowhere in Scripture is God's 
Sovereignty more impressively pro- 
claimed than in the contrasts drawn 
again and again between the august 
dignity of Theism and the pathetic 
attempts of idolatry to set up for 
worship man-made creations that 
fail at every point to satisfy the 
hopes of those who trust in them. 
The scene on Carmel between Elijah 
and the Baal worshippers is immor- 
tal for the tragic contrast drawn 
between the Sovereign Jehovah and 
the impotent Baal ; and where will 
one find anything more magnificent 
than the march of thought in the 
115th Psalm, where Theism is set 
off against idolatry : " Wherefore 
should the nations say: where is 
now their God ? Our God is in 
the heavens; He hath done whatso- 
ever He pleased. Their idols are 
silver and gold ; the work of men's 
hands. They have mouths, but they 

216 



The Sovereignty of God 

speak not ; eyes have they, but they 
see not ; they have ears, but they hear 
not ; noses have they, but they smell 
not ; they have hands, but they han- 
dle not; feet have they, but they 
walk not ; neither speak they through 
their throat. They that make them 
shall be like unto them. Yea, every 
one that trusteth in them. O Israel, 
trust thou in the Lord ; He is their 
help and their shield." 

One may say with truth, there is 
no discussion, among those who be- 
lieve the Bible, as to the Sovereignty 
of God. That is both assumed and 
expressed in all Christian thought. 
Upon that Rock we build the entire 
structure of our faith. He who as- 
sails the Sovereignty of God as- 
sails not only our religion, but the 
great presupposition on which reli- 
gion stands. Shatter or even shake 
that Rock-Thought of God's Sov- 
ereignty, and our religion, built on 

it, collapses like a flimsy tenement. 

217 



The Sovereignty of God 

But while belief in the Sovereignty 
of God is unanimous and unques- 
tioned, there are differences in the 
interpretation of that fact, differ- 
ences of view as to the manner in 
which God exercises His Sover- 
eignty. The minds of men, by rea- 
son of temperament, training, and 
others influences, study the Sov- 
ereignty from different points of 
view, and report differently concern- 
ing its mode, while agreeing abso- 
lutely in the fact. The Sovereignty 
of God is regarded as a fact wher- 
ever Christian thought prevails, but 
the point of view from which one 
sets out to study the Bible doctrine 
of God may lead to conclusions re- 
garding the mode in which Sov- 
ereignty is exercised which are dif- 
ferent from those entertained by 
him who has thought his way to 
God along another line of ideas. 
Each should do full justice to the 
fairness and consecration of the 

218 



The Sovereignty of God 

other. Each should think less of 
the differences in individual points 
of view than of the oneness of the 
all-important fact, which both are 
contemplating and which enables 
both alike to say : " Alleluia, for the 
Lord God Omnipotent reigneth." 

The main difference between in- 
terpretations of the mode of God's 
Sovereignty lies at one point, namely, 
this : There are those who, starting 
with the idea of the eternal decree fix- 
ing in advance the destiny of each in- 
dividual in the life hereafter, reason 
with relation to the present life that 
everything in this life must also be 
fixed by the decree, and that the 
Sovereignty of God consists in His 
absolute control over all that is, so 
that nothing comes to pass save as 
an expression, direct or indirect, of 
His Omnipotent Will. On the 
other hand, there are those who 
cannot accept that interpretation of 

Scripture which represents God as 

219 



The Sovereignty of God 

fixing in advance by a decree the 
destiny of His creatures in a future 
life, and such minds, reasoning with 
relation to the present life, see no 
necessity that events in our present 
state of being shall be fixed by a de- 
cree. It seems to them that the 
Sovereignty of God stands in more 
harmonious relation to the other 
attributes of His Character, such as 
Love, and Justice, and Truth, and 
is greatly exalted and glorified 
when it is regarded as carrying 
forward an eternal Plan of Love, 
notwithstanding those adverse con- 
ditions which prevail by reason of 
sin; and is not looked upon as bring- 
ing to pass all that takes place in a 
world where, apparently, sin, and in- 
justice, and dishonor, and cruelty, 
and mistake have a large influence 
in producing the conditions which 
we find to exist. 

It is assumed that the reader is 
familiar with the two interpretations 

220 



The Sovereignty of God 

of the idea of God's Sovereignty 
here briefly delineated. The former 
of the two theories, that which attri- 
butes every event directly or indi- 
rectly to the Sovereignty of God, 
could not perhaps be better summed 
up, in its essential intent, than by 
quoting the familiar saying, " What- 
ever is, is right." The writer yields 
to no one in his admiration for some 
who have gone through life, and for 
some who are now valiantly going 
through life, with this as their motto. 
He appreciates the unflinching loy- 
alty which prompts a man or a 
woman, in the presence of that 
which by every instinct of nature, 
and by every impulse of morality, 
one inclines to pronounce bad and 
wrong, and cruel and infamous, still 
to say, " Whatever is, is right." That 
which makes such a position pos- 
sible — and it is possible for many 
— is the interpretation put upon the 
Sovereignty of God ; namely, that 

221 



The Sovereignty of God 

the Sovereignty of God is impaired if 
anything takes place contrary to His 
Will ; that if we grant the occurrence 
of events in which God has had no 
part, we make the Devil greater than 
God, and take from the very brow 
of Infinity its crown of Sovereignty. 
If this interpretation of Sovereignty 
be the only one consistent with Scrip- 
ture, let us bow to it, and in time learn, 
from the example of some whose 
characters we revere, to bow to it 
without a murmur. For we cannot 
part with our belief in God's Sover- 
eignty without parting with our 
religion; and if it must be that the 
Sovereignty of God cannot be main- 
tained on other grounds, then we 
will take it on this ground ; we will 
bow to the inevitable ; we will even 
say " Kismet " with the Mohamme- 
dan; for we cannot live without God, 
and a God there cannot be without 
Sovereignty. The universe is void 
of Deity, unless " the Lord God 

222 



The Sovereignty of God 

Omnipotent reigneth." A God with- 
out Sovereignty is no God. 

It is fair to state why some have 
felt that this conception of an ab- 
solute sovereignty controlling all 
events, good and bad, and bringing 
to pass all that is, is not the high- 
est and most magnificent concep- 
tion of God's Sovereignty which 
the mind is capable of entertaining. 
It may be pointed out, in passing, 
that the general tendency of an 
advancing Christian civilization is 
to modify and soften and restrain 
the more extreme views of sover- 
eignty which prevailed in an earlier 
and less intelligent age. The sover- 
eign of a barbaric or semi-barbaric 
state identifies with his sovereignty, 
not only as its right, but as a con- 
dition of its existence, the freedom 
to do anything, good or bad. The 
sovereignty of the semi-barbaric 
state is absolutism. A fair example 
of it is seen to-day at Constantinople, 

223 



The Sovereignty of God 

in the person of a Sultan issuing in 
one breath rigid instructions for the 
safety of resident foreigners, and in 
the next mowing down helpless 
women and children with the drip- 
ping scimitars of Kurdish tribesmen. 
An advanced Christian civilization 
knows that true sovereignty needs 
no such absolutism wherewith to 
maintain itself; that sovereignty 
reaches its highest dignity when, 
self-limited by the restraints of right- 
eousness and mercy, it works for the 
larger good in the uplifting of men 
and the peace of nations. So also 
it appears to some that the Sover- 
eignty of God needs no such sup- 
port as that theory of absolutism 
which would set God behind all the 
events of the world, the indiscrim- 
inate Providence, dealing misery as 
well as happiness, confusion as well 
as peace, profligacy as well as piety, 
disease as well as health. Some ques- 
tion if there be not a loftier concep- 

224 



The Sovereignty of God 

tion of a Divine Sovereignty than 
this, even as there is a loftier con- 
ception of human sovereignty than 
that which corresponds to this. But 
still further, we question whether the 
Bible does not directly and continu- 
ously say that God is not in every- 
thing, and that the world is passing 
through experiences in which many 
vast forces are at work which in no 
sense represent Christ, but Anti- 
Christ, — that which is against God 
and contrary to God. We question 
whether the Bible does not directly 
state that the Sovereignty of God 
is not now supreme on earth. If 
it were supreme now, if whatever is, 
is right, for what could even God 
ask beyond this ? But does not the 
Bible say that God's Sovereignty is 
not now supremely effective over all 
life, that there are enemies yet to be 
subdued, and that it is to be supreme 
in the end? Does not the Bible say: 
" Thou hast put all things in subjec- 
15 225 



The Sovereignty of God 

tion under His Feet. For in that He 
put all in subjection under Him, He 
left nothing that is not put under 
Him. But now we see not yet all 
things put under Him. For He 
must reign till He hath put all His 
enemies under His Feet. The last 
enemy that shall be abolished is 
death." It thus appears that God's 
Sovereignty needs no such support 
as that which those devout men have 
sought to give who have held that 
we make the devil greater than God 
unless we regard all events as issu- 
ing from the One Almighty Source. 
What, then, is that interpretation of 
the Sovereignty of God which, in the 
belief of some, rises to a higher 
plane of thought and leads the wor- 
shipper up to a grander view of the 
Divine Majesty? 

Some features of this other inter- 
pretation may be stated. They are 
stated tentatively. Some may adopt 
them with the full consent of reason, 

226 



The Sovereignty of God 

affection, faith, and will ; daring to 
take, not one step alone, but all 
the steps that lead the mind from 
the Sovereignty of God in the eter- 
nal past, to His Sovereignty in the 
earthly present ; and on to that glo- 
rious outlook in the eternal future, 
when all things shall be subdued 
unto Him, and when God shall be 
all in all. For those who can take 
these steps, the Sovereignty of God 
becomes a thought of enrapturing 
joy ; and even here, in the struggle 
of the earth, one seems by antici- 
pation to take ones part in that 
great canticle of the glorified : " Al- 
leluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent 
reigneth." 

The Sovereignty of God is seen 
in that Infinite Plan concerning man, 
conceived in the eternal past by the 
Mind of the Omnipotent. Before 
the foundations of the world were 
laid, there lay in the Infinite Mind 
a Purpose to make a race of beings 

227 



The Sovereignty of God 

peculiarly identified with Himself in 
nature, and susceptible of develop- 
ment into ideal perfection, according 
to the perfection of the Christ-Image. 

The Sovereignty of God is seen 
in the existence of man. That the 
creature on whom the Infinite Mind 
pondered in Eternity came to exist 
in time, is an act of Sovereignty. 
Whatever theory of human origins 
may at last prevail, the fact ante- 
dates all theories concerning it. 
Man exists. He finds himself upon 
the earth. The Creator has created 
what the Sovereign has willed. 

The Sovereignty of God is seen 
in the freedom of man. Freedom 
is the crowning endowment of the 
man. That man shall be free like 
God, was the Plan. That man is 
free, is the sovereign act of Him Who 
planned. This freedom is freedom, 
not the burlesque and pantomime 
of freedom. This freedom implies 
the power to sin. Short-sighted, 

228 



The Sovereignty of God 

we cry " Oh, why does God make 
man with the power to sin ? ,1 Ah I 
look further on before you answer; 
look on into the future ; remember 
that the power to sin implies also 
the power not to sin, and the Plan 
of the Eternal shall not be con- 
summated until this race of beings 
having the power to sin, and for a 
time using that power perversely, 
shall reach at length the Godward 
use of freedom in perfect union 
with the Plan of their Sovereign. 

The Sovereignty of God is seen 
in the unaltered constitution of law, 
notwithstanding man's long misuse 
of freedom. The world was a per- 
fect world ; and the world is a perfect 
world to-day, in its organic structure 
and law. And as at the beginning 
man found that certain uses of his 
freedom contrary to the Divine order 
of the world would bring, in the 
nature of the case, certain results 
unfavorable to health and happiness, 

229 



The Sovereignty of God 

so he finds that the Divine order 
of the world is unchanged to-day, 
and whoever resists it, sooner or 
later breaks himself against it But 
the confusion and the sorrow are a 
million times increased and com- 
plicated, and the innocent are help- 
lessly involved with the guilty by 
the persistence of the race in its 
misuses of freedom. Man listens 
to the evil and impure spirit when 
he should listen to the Holy and 
Divine Spirit. He resists the Sov- 
ereignty of God, and breaks him- 
self and others to pieces against the 
Divine order of a great and glorious 
world. 

The Sovereignty of God is seen 
in the persistence of His Plan of 
Love, notwithstanding the presence 
of evil and the activity of Satanic 
influence. Can any one ask if we 
are making God less than the devil 
when one looks back upon the 
stupendous progress of the Plan of 

230 



The Sovereignty of God 

God through the ages of history ? 
With sin a constant possibility, 
growing out of the very existence 
of human and angelic freedom ; with 
sin a fearful fact from the begin- 
ning; with human perversity and dev- 
ilish malignity growing more intense 
at every point, — what has the Sov- 
ereign done, what is He doing, for 
the race He loves ? Let Christ and 
Christianity be the answer : The 
Divine Sacrifice and the Universal 
Gospel. History is the answer to 
those who think that God is put 
beneath Satan, when we cease to 
count God the Author of events 
which are incompatible with His 
Character. The victories of truth, 
the growth of liberty, the triumphs 
of Christ's Gospel, the Mission of 
the Holy Ghost since Pentecost, tell 
us that He Who once in the lonely 
wilderness cried, " Get Thee behind 
Me, Satan," is the Sovereign Who 
is grandly working out His Plan 

231 



The Sovereignty of God 

under conditions adapted in all re- 
spects to the inherent and inalien- 
able freedom of the race. 

The Sovereignty of God is seen 
in His constant uses of evil for the 
education of the race and of the in- 
dividual. He Who made a sinless 
race with power to live in untainted 
blessedness, and with power to 
plunge itself in misery, when that 
race takes the weaker course and 
plunges itself in misery, shows His 
Sovereignty in no more marvellous 
way than in His power to overrule 
mistakes and calamities and sins, 
so that out of their misery may come 
consequences that shall help toward 
the redemption of the race. So Saul 
is converted by impressions received 
at the bloody death of Stephen; so 
countless inventions and discoveries, 
of infinite consolation and help to 
the afflicted race, have sprung out of 
conditions wholly produced by sin 
and misery. The hideousness of 

232 



The Sovereignty of God 

disease has stimulated the power and 
enriched the resources of surgery, 
and above all else, the Holy Spirit, 
dealing with Christians plunged in 
human misery, has brought out spirit- 
ual results of patience, heroism, holy 
consecration which have made the 
name of " saint " the highest and 
greatest title a human life can bear. 

The Sovereignty of God is seen 
n that Vision of the Final Triumph, 
vhen the Plan that was conceived in 
.he eternal past shall have reached, 
through and over all hindrances 
perversely thrust in its way, by the 
freedom of fallen men and devils, 
that only consummation which is 
possible under the Omnipotence 
of God. Satan's power shall be 
checked and chained. Sin, and 
those who persist in it, shall no more 
hinder the onward sweep of an 
Omnipotent Purpose. Death shall 
be swallowed up in victory; sorrow 
and sighing shall flee away; Man 

233 



The Sovereignty of God 

shall stand glorified in the Presence 
of God, and shall be made like Him, 
seeing Him as He is; — and God, 
the Sovereign of all orders of beings, 
the King Eternal, the Only Wise, 
the Only Infinite, of Whom are all 
things, by Whom are all things, to 
Whom are all things, — God shall 
be all in all. 



234 



IX 



THE APPLICATION OF THE SACRI- 
FICE OF CHRIST TO THE PRESENT 
CONDITION OF SOCIETY 



235 



Let your manner of life be worthy of the Gos- 
pel of Christ. In lowliness of mind each count- 
ing the other better than himself ; not looking 
each of you to his own things, but each of you 
also to the things of others. Have this mind in 
you which was also in Christ Jesus. 

Epistle to the Philippians. 

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the 
law of Christ. Epistle to the Galatians. 

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that 
He loved us, and sent His Son to be the Propitia- 
tion for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, 
we also ought to love one another. 

First Epistle of St. John. 

Hereby know we love, because He laid down 
His Life for us : and we ought to lay down our 
lives for the brethren. But whoso hath the 
world's goods, and beholdeth his brother in need, 
and shutteth up his compassion from him, how 
doth the love of God abide in him? 

First Epistle of St. John. 

The grace of God hath appeared, bringing 
salvation to all men, instructing us, to the intent 
that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we 
should live soberly and righteously and godly in 
this present world; looking for the blessed hope 
and appearing of the glory of our great God 
and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who gave Himself 
for us. Epistle to Titus. 

And Jesus came to them and spake unto them, 
saying, All authority hath been given unto Me 
in heaven and on earth. Go ye, therefore, and 
make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them 
into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Ghost ; teaching them to observe all 
things whatsoever I commanded you : and lo, I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world. 

Gospel of St. Matthew. 
236 



Chapter IX 

The Application of the Sacrifice of 
Christ to the Present Condition 
of Society 

When we entered upon our pres- 
ent course of thought, we defined 
Christianity as the Gospel of the 
Divine Sacrifice. We said: Chris- 
tianity derives its name from Christ, 
its meaning from the Cross. Chris- 
tianity reduced to its simplest terms, 
gives " Jesus Christ and Him cruci- 
fied." One purpose has run through 
these chapters : to unfold a doctrine 
of God consistent with Jesus Christ 
and Him crucified, to see God in 
the light of His supreme Self-reve- 
lation as the crucified Saviour of 
mankind. It remains to point out 
some of the ways in which such a 
Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice as 

237 



An Application of Sacrifice 

we have described tends to modify 
our opinions and our conduct as 
members of human society ; in other 
words, to apply the Sacrifice of 
Christ to the present condition of 
society, and to individual personality 
and conduct 

On general principles, it may be 
assumed that one's social opinions 
and conduct are affected by one's be- 
liefs. It is almost an axiom, that as 
a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. 
Motives of expediency may induce an 
individual to affect among men a 
manner of life not supported by his 
secret convictions. But such expe- 
dients are usually as transparent as 
they are hazardous. What society 
is, commonly represents with fairness 
what society believes. This fact, 
true in connection with so many of 
our beliefs, is obviously true in con- 
nection with our belief about God. 
One's doctrine of God determines 
largely one's doctrine of living. 

238 



An Application of Sacrifice 

" As He is, so are we in this world;" 
that is, our conceptions of God, of 
His attitude toward man, of His 
purpose for man, of His relation to 
the trouble and misery of life, 
strongly influence our views of living 
and our opinions on many subjects 
affecting the order and well-being of 
society. If a man is a fatalist in his 
belief about God, he is apt to be a 
fatalist in his opinions about men 
and in his conduct toward men. 
Back of the Turkish atrocities lies 
the Turkish belief, — a fatalistic doc- 
trine of God. The bloody foreground 
of their social conduct corresponds 
with the lurid background of their 
faith, which is fatalism. As God has 
inexorably determined all things, so 
that whatever is, is that which was to 
be ; therefore to butcher Armenians 
is but the Will of God. 

As far from fatalism as the west 
is from the east, is the doctrine of 
God which has been expanding be- 

239 



An Application of Sacrifice 

fore us in the Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice. Without attempting to 
re-state in detail conclusions which 
are now familiar, a few sentences 
will bring out the contrasts between 
conclusions we have reached and 
those reached by others as earnest 
and as conscientious as ourselves 
in their desire to know God. It is 
held by some that God, by an eter- 
nal decree, has fixed in advance the 
destinies of individuals, appointing 
some to inevitable salvation, aban- 
doning others to inevitable damna- 
tion. But we have seemed to see in 
the Election Scriptures the possibil- 
ity of an alternate interpretation ; 
namely, God's eternal Purpose of 
love for the whole race, that it shall 
be conformed to the Image of His 
Son ; a purpose whose fulfilment in 
the individual is conditioned upon 
the will of the individual who, made 
by God to possess the power of 
choice, is not under any circum- 

240 



An Application of Sacrifice 

stances dehumanized by the Maker 
through the withdrawal of that in- 
dividual liberty. 

It is held by some that the 
Atonement is limited, that Christ 
died for the elect only; but w 7 e have 
seemed to see in His Death a uni- 
versal reference, a tasting of death 
for every man, a Propitiation for the 
whole world. 

It is held by some that God's atti- 
tude toward man is one of wrath 
and destructive intent, and that that 
w T rath has been appeased only by 
the gracious and heroic conduct of 
Christ, Who has interposed between 
us and God, to save us, by His 
Death, from God's anger; but we 
have seemed to see that the purpose 
of the Loving Christ is identical, in 
the Unity of the Godhead, with the 
purpose of the Loving Father, and 
that the Atonement is the act of 
the Godhead, whereby Divine Holi- 
ness condemns sin, that Divine Love 

16 241 



An Application of Sacrifice 

may forgive sin, and may still fulfil its 
eternal purpose for the beloved race. 

It is held by some that the trouble 
and miseries of life are in accord- 
ance with the mysterious Will of 
God, and, for some inscrutable rea- 
son, are permitted to distress man- 
kind ; and that they are steps in the 
plan of love. But we have seemed 
to see that all misery is part of the 
universal blight of sin ; that it is 
not directly or indirectly permitted 
or consented unto by the Will of 
God ; that it is not His Plan, but is 
the outcome of man's innumerable 
and constant misuses of freedom ; 
and that the Sovereignty of God is 
shown not by the permission of evil 
foreign to His Nature, nor by licens- 
ing the sin which causes evil, but by 
bringing onward through the ages 
His glorious Plan of good, and by 
still carrying it on toward its final 
consummation through and in spite 

of all the evils wrought by sin, and 

242 



An Application of Sacrifice 

without depriving man of his in- 
dividual right of freedom, however 
much man may abuse that right, 
and, by that abuse, hinder the Pur- 
pose of his Loving Father. 

If, as we have already remarked, a 
fatalistic doctrifre of God tends to 
fatalistic opinions about life and 
fatalistic conduct toward men, it 
is proper to inquire, after having 
stated these conclusions, at which 
we have arrived through studying 
the Gospel of the Divine Sacri- 
fice, how such views of God as 
these modify our views of living, and 
affect our attitude toward some of 
the modern conditions of society. 
St. Paul, in that Epistle which con- 
tains, perhaps, the most magnificent 
resume ever given of the manner 
and meaning of the Divine Sacri- 
fice, says : " Let your manner of life 
be w r orthy of the Gospel of Christ ; 
in lowliness of mind each counting 
the other better than himself; not 

243 



An Application of Sacrifice 

looking each of you to his own 
things, but each of you also to the 
things of others. Have this mind 
in you which was also in Christ 
Jesus." As those magnificent words 
come to us we look forth upon the 
present condition of society, and ask, 
How does the Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice relate itself to-day to human 
society ? We note three facts which 
very largely cover the situation : The 
Present Crisis in Human Society; 
The Disastrous Effects upon Society 
of an erroneous doctrine of God; 
The Hope for Society contained in 
a true application of the Gospel of 
the Divine Sacrifice. 

a. The Present Crisis in Human 
Society. It is a large thing to speak 
of ; and yet, if one can sketch in its 
outlines, one brings it within range. 
Its outlines are these : the growth of 
knowledge, the growth of individu- 
alism, the growth of irreligion, the 
weakness of the Church. The growth 

244 



An Application of Sacrifice 

of knowledge is the great modern 
miracle. Knowledge is no longer 
the monopoly of a class. It has be- 
come the common possession of the 
race. The children who live in ten- 
ement houses to-day have better 
advantages than the children in 
baronial castles three hundred years 
ago. The laborer, going to his work 
to-day, may buy for the smallest sum 
in our coinage what an earl of the 
fifteenth century could not have pur- 
chased with a sack of sovereigns : 
the contemporary news of the world. 
There was a time when knowledge 
was the forbidden fruit, guarded by 
a jealous caste from indiscriminate 
depredations of unwashed humanity. 
We may be on the threshold of a 
time when the possession of knowl- 
edge will be compulsory ; when the 
state may make it a misdemeanor 
not to know. As the result of the 
growth of knowledge we find the 
growth of individualism. When men 

245 



An Application of Sacrifice 

are in a state of ignorance, they run 
in droves, like dumb, driven cattle. 
When they get knowledge, they 
think for themselves. And the 
more they think the more they 
differ; the droves break up, turn, 
trample their drovers, and scatter 
into individualism. It is an error to 
call anarchy the child of ignorance. 
Anarchy is the child of knowledge, 
fed on false ideas of God. As the 
result of the growth of individualism 
we find the growth of irreligion. 
" Irreligious " means, " destitute of 
religion ; " " not controlled by reli- 
gious motives or principles. " Ac- 
cording to the terms of this defini- 
tion, there are more irreligious peo- 
ple in our civilization now than ever 
before. Does individualism neces- 
sarily produce irreligion ? By no 
means. If that were true, it would 
mean that ignorance is the protector 
of religion. There is no natural rea- 
son why growth of knowledge and the 

246 



An Application of Sacrifice 

corresponding growth of individual- 
istic thought should lead to irreligion. 
Because people think for themselves, 
is no reason why they may not think 
alike about God. Why then do we 
find the growth of individualism fol- 
lowed by the growth of irreligion? 
Why do we find in our civilization 
immense multitudes who, we will not 
say antagonize religion, but let it 
alone, have nothing to do with it, 
live without it, in an individualism 
of pure godlessness ? Because of 
the weakness of the Church. It is 
not easy to speak of the weakness of 
the Church. It is to be feared that 
Christians tend to exaggerate, in 
their own minds, the strength of the 
Church. They see it through the 
warm light of enthusiasm and affec- 
tion. In many ways the Church is 
strong as a factor in human affairs. 
She has large properties; she has an 
influential and numerous member- 
ship ; she has heavy moral weight in 

247 



An Application of Sacrifice 

the balance of current questions : and 
yet over the individuals who, by the 
million, make up society, the influ- 
ence of the Church in this age of uni- 
versal knowledge and independent 
thought is not what it was in an earlier 
age of greater ignorance and lesser lib- 
erty. In that earlier age, the Church 
had a temporal power over the bodies 
and properties of men which she has 
long since surrendered to the grow- 
ing forces of constitutional govern- 
ment. So also in that twilight age 
of popular ignorance, the Church 
could appeal to men through their 
superstitious fears, and could hold 
them by her mystical threatenings 
in ways that have largely vanished, 
and are destined utterly to vanish in 
the broad, unromantic daylight of 
common knowledge. While losing 
these artificial aids, characteristic of 
less intelligent times, it does not ap- 
pear that the Church has evolved any 
new principle of leadership suffi- 

248 



An Application of Sacrifice 

ciently powerful to draw the multi- 
tude in this great modern age of in- 
dividualism. It does not seem as if 
she had enough to give men, to keep 
pace with the new deeds of human 
society developed under the new 
conditions of advanced knowledge 
and entire liberty of thought. There- 
fore we behold with the growth of in- 
dividualism, the growth of irreligion ; 
the decline of popular interest in the 
Lord's Day, the widespread disposi- 
tion to substitute for communion 
with God secular humanitarianism ; 
and the culture of the social instincts 
for holiness, and the life of faith. 
This, briefly sketched in outline, ap- 
pears to be the Present Crisis in Hu- 
man Society. It has been long and 
slowly coming, as growing knowl- 
edge has brought growing individu- 
alism, and growing individualism 
has, through the weakness of the 
Church, scattered to some extent the 
material of society in growing irre- 

249 



An Application of Sacrifice 

ligion. This crisis is now upon us. 
For the last ten or twenty years 
Christians have slowly been waking 
up to it. To-day they are awake. 
Awake to two facts: on the one 
hand, the disastrous effects upon 
society of a mistaken doctrine of 
God ; on the other hand, the hope 
for society contained in a true ap- 
plication of the Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice. 

b. It has already been said that 
growing irreligion is not a necessary 
result of growing knowledge. It 
cannot be that He Who is the 
Source of all knowledge has made 
man so that knowledge pulls him 
away from God. It cannot be that 
He Who redeemed Humanity by a 
Divine Sacrifice and has established 
His Church in the earth for a wit- 
ness to His Sacrifice, has built that 
Church on lines so narrow that 
society outgrows the Church by 
ceasing to be ignorant and super- 

250 



An Application of Sacrifice 

stitious, and by becoming intelligent 
and free to think for itself. This 
supposition is incredible. It can be 
raised only to be dismissed. But an- 
other question rises in its stead that 
cannot be waived aside. Has the 
Church weakened herself by teaching 
a doctrine of God, and a doctrine of 
the Church, and a doctrine of human- 
ity which, however conscientiously 
taught, has failed to express the deep- 
est meaning of that Gospel which 
Christ delivered to the world ? Has 
the Church built up a theory of God 
which has made it hard for human- 
ity to fling itself, with all its sin and 
sorrow, upon the Heart of God ? 
Has the Church made God seem 
to be other than He is — an angry 
Sovereign, damning unborn genera- 
tions for uncommitted sins ; a vindic- 
tive Judge, seizing the innocent 
Christ and slaying Him for the 
guilty ; a pitiless oppressor, beat- 
ing a helpless race with the nine- 

251 



An Application of Sacrifice 

tailed whip of misery, sorrow, acci- 
dent, disease, poverty, overwork, 
death ? As the conditions of hu- 
man society change, as superstition 
melts away before the growth of 
knowledge, as constitutional liberty 
strikes off the fetters from human 
thought, it is possible that the 
traditional doctrine of God, by fail- 
ing to express the fulness of the 
Gospel, may have had something to 
do with that popular cry of to-day 
that the old Church teachings are 
outgrown by men of thought. If 
that cry could only be modified in 
one single particular, possibly it 
would state a truth. The Uni- 
tarians are right in their "forward 
movement," as far as it goes ; right 
in saying that the thought of men 
appears to be growing away from 
some of the old Church teaching, 
and to be approaching the point 
where Christian religion shall be 
understood to be an expression on 

252 



An Application of Sacrifice 

earth of the spirit of Jesus Christ. 
Can they not go one step farther? 
Can they not advance to the super- 
naturalism of the New Testament? 
Can they not acknowledge Who 
Jesus Christ is, according to the 
New Testament, and admit that 
Christianity is the expression on 
earth of the Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice, God giving Himself on 
earth in love for man ? The best 
thought of the world has not out- 
grown the New Testament. The 
best thought of the world is grow- 
ing toward the New Testament, and 
toward the magnificent proportions 
of that doctrine of God which is 
announced to the world in the Gos- 
pel of the Divine Sacrifice. 

c. If it be true that an erroneous 
doctrine of God is a vital disaster to 
society, then one is justified in say- 
ing that the hope for society, under 
its present conditions, would be con- 
tained in a true application to those 

253 



An Application of Sacrifice 

conditions of the Gospel of the 
Divine Sacrifice. The hope that is 
bound up for mankind with a widen- 
ing appreciation of God as He is 
revealed in the Atonement, is the 
most blessed theme of which a man 
can speak. We stand at a point in 
the history of religious thought 
when, like the light of the sunrise 
touching peak after peak of the 
mountains or glorifying league after 
league of the sea, there is spread- 
ing from mind to mind a new con- 
ception of that ancient Gospel — 
God is Love. The old earth-born 
gloomy cloud is passing away from 
between man and the Face of God. 
The lurid scholastic legends of 
Divine anger and revenge and de- 
structive intent are fading from the 
minds of men ; and suffering hu- 
manity, lifting up its eyes in earthly 
torment, is beginning to discern the 
light of the knowledge of the glory 
of God in the Face of Jesus Christ. 

254 



An Application of Sacrifice 

And our religion is beginning to 
recover the primitive New Testa- 
ment conception of the Atonement, 
as Gods sorrowing act of Self- 
humiliation, inspired by His immor- 
tal love for us men, His immortal 
desire for our salvation ; and we are 
beginning to believe that what Hu- 
manity most needs is that revelation 
of the Love of God, that inspiration 
to a better life, that consolation in 
trouble, and that tender, redemptive 
help in weakness and temptation 
and failure which w r ere revealed 
once for all in the Gospel of the 
Divine Sacrifice. The words of St. 
John are coming back to the best 
thought of men, in these last days, 
like a long lost chord of music : 
"Herein is love, not that we loved 
God, but that He loved us, and sent 
His Son to be the Propitiation for 
our sins. Beloved, if God so loved 
us, we also ought to love one 
another." It is the beginning of a 

255 



An Application of Sacrifice 

new era, and if its consummation 
be not suddenly hastened by the 
glorious appearing of our Great God 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ, we shall 
see this new spirit of love giving 
back to the Church all the influence 
over human thought she seemed to 
be losing when, with the growth of 
knowledge, men seemed to be out- 
growing faith. Men cannot out- 
grow faith, if that faith be founded 
in a true doctrine of God. The 
growth of knowledge only broadens 
those faculties by which we know 
the value of truth, and the best 
thought of men ever grows toward, 
not away from, a true doctrine of God, 
for man intuitively feels and con- 
fesses his need of God. And if this 
true doctrine of God can be set 
forth before human society in all its 
height and depth and length and 
breadth, if God can at length be 
shown to men as He is, the Friend 
and Lover of all souls, Who came 

256 



An Application of Sacrifice 

of His own free will into this world 
to seek and to save, Who has tasted 
death " for us men and for our salva- 
tion," Who suffers with man in all 
his sorrows and needs, and Who is 
working out for man a glorious 
destiny in which the strongest and 
the weakest alike may share, we 
shall see, and even now are we be- 
ginning to see, how Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified may alter the opin- 
ions and the conduct of men in the 
twentieth century. Changes that 
are now only in their slow begin- 
ning will mature; opinions that 
are now held only by a few will 
strengthen into general convictions; 
In the treatment of criminals, in the 
growth of social tenderness, in the 
progress of Catholic Unity, and in 
the zeal for missions, the prediction 
is here ventured that we shall see the 
Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice ap- 
plied more and more practically to 
the existing conditions of society. 
17 257 



An Application of Sacrifice 

The treatment of criminals shall be 
considered in the light of the Divine 
Sacrifice. The chief end of judicial 
action toward wrongdoers will be 
seen, in the light of a larger doc- 
trine of God, to be redemptive; and 
though the safety of society may 
require in specific instances the life- 
long separation of the offender, no 
crime will be thought to justify the 
punishment of death. The gallows 
and the electric chair have no place 
in an advanced Christian civilization. 
They are survivals of a mode of 
thought and of a mode of conduct 
which characterized an earlier age. 
The killing of men, on the evidence 
and judgment of men who are them- 
selves to die, grows out of a mis- 
taken idea that death is an act of 
God, and that under certain circum- 
stances we have a right to forestall 
that act and to precipitate that judg- 
ment. But we shall reach the time 
when even our courts shall recog- 

258 



An Application of Sacrifice 

nize that the conditions which lead 
up to murder have oftenest their 
essential causes far back of the indi- 
vidual guilty of the crime ; and so- 
ciety will at length admit that He 
Who tasted death for every man can 
love even a murderer, and can have a 
plan of grace for him with which 
sinful and fallible men have no right 
to tamper. 

Day by day we all feel that a new 
spirit of social sympathy is spring- 
ing up among men. Its true cause 
is the better understanding of the 
Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice. All 
who study attentively the signs of 
the times, must note (with Mr. Ben- 
jamin Kidd) 1 the new spirit of ten- 
derness that is spreading through the 
most prosperous class in the social 
order toward those who have less 
opportunity in the struggle of life. 
And, as he points out, religion is its 
root; the religion of love constrain- 

1 Social Evolution, pp. 158-165, ed. 1894, Mac- 
millan. 259 



An Application of Sacrifice 

ing to the expression of love. Won- 
drously is this spirit spreading, 
wondrously is it destined to spread, 
as men grow to realize that God 
looks on human miseries with an 
infinitely deeper pity than man can 
feel, and that all that we can do to 
relieve suffering, to guide and coun- 
sel ignorance, to throw light into 
dark and dreary places, to spend and 
be spent for others, is along the line 
of that eternal Plan of the All-Lov- 
ing One, which human sin and fail- 
ure may hinder, but cannot wholly 
turn aside. Yes ! It is the long-lost 
chord of St. John's music coming 
back : " Hereby know we love, be- 
cause He laid down His Life for 
us : and we ought to lay down 
our lives for the brethren. But 
whoso hath the world's goods and 
beholdeth his brother in need, and 
shutteth up his compassion from 
him, how doth the love of God abide 

in him ? " 

260 



An Application of Sacrifice 

Every lover of Catholic Unity- 
must look into the twentieth cen- 
tury with hope, when he perceives 
how the best thought of Christians 
is tending more and more to relate 
the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice 
to a unified Church. Christ is being 
lifted up in these latter days, and 
light is pouring upon His Cross, 
as Biblical study insists on break- 
ing from mediaeval trammels and 
going back to claim its liberty in 
the Scriptures. Far are we now 
from Catholic Unity. Still does the 
Church persist in weakening herself 
by setting arbitrary difficulties in the 
way of unity, but while official 
stumbling-blocks abound, the hearts 
of those who rejoice in Him are 
drawn near to one another ; and as 
this larger perception of God's Love 
deepens everywhere, no sudden and 
great advance toward Catholic Unity 
could surprise us, nor be larger than 

we should hope for among those 

261 



An Application of Sacrifice 

from whose vision of God the clouds 
of gloomy error have melted away. 

The Gospel of the Divine Sacri- 
fice is the essential inspiration of 
missions. The evangelizing of the 
world, the making disciples of all 
the nations, was the primitive idea 
of Christianity. " All authority," 
said Christ, "has been given unto 
Me in heaven and on earth. Go ye 
therefore and make disciples of all 
the nations, baptizing them into the 
name of the Father, and of the Son, 
and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them 
to observe all things whatsoever I 
commanded you. And lo ! I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of 
the world." For centuries, while the 
Church seemed to incline toward a 
fatalistic doctrine of God, the evan- 
gelizing of the world languished. 
For centuries she had practically no 
missions. But now, in this last 
century, with its tremendous growth 
in knowledge and in individualism, 

262 



An Application of Sacrifice 

with its mighty movement of lib- 
eralism, we have witnessed the 
growth of modern missions, which 
have spread to every part of the 
earth, and which were never dearer 
to Christians than to-day, when fa- 
natical persecutions have risen up 
against them in foreign lands. 
Those persecutions seem, both at 
home and on the mission field, to 
have had no other effect than that 
of deepening the conviction that 
missions must go on, and shall go 
on, at any cost of money or of blood. 
Why this glorious earnestness ? 
Why this joyous and heroic unani- 
mity? Because the sweet, clear, 
simple Gospel of the New Testa- 
ment is coming back and taking its 
place in human thought, weary with 
speculation and dogmatism. The 
long lost chord is ringing everywhere 
through Christian hearts : " God is 
Love ! God is Love ! 1 " The world 
is full of sorrow, full of failure, full of 

263 



An Application of Sacrifice 

devilish sin and shame, but — God 
is Love ; God is Love ! the Saviour 
of the world, the Friend of the friend- 
less, the Light of Life, the Conqueror 
of Death ! 



264 



X 



THE NEW TESTAMENT IDEA OF 
PERSONALITY 



265 



For in Him we live and move and have our 
being. 

Acts of the Apostles. 

And the God of Peace Himself sanctify you 
wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body 
be preserved entire, without blame, at the com- 
ing of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

First Epistle to the Thessalonians. 



266 



Chapter X 

The New Testament Idea of 
Personality 

In his Athenian oration St. Paul 
asserts Mans life in God. " In 
Him we live and move and have 
our being." In one of his Thessa- 
lonian letters he declares God's Life 
in Man: " God Himself sanctify 
you wholly, and may your spirit and 
soul and body be preserved entire 
at the coming of our Lord." By 
co-ordinating these two thoughts, — 
Man's life in God, God's Life in 
Man, — we obtain the New Testa- 
ment idea of Personality. The most 
wondrous thing about life, for one 
who accepts the New Testament Idea 
of Personality, is life itself. Nothing 
that man does is so wonderful as 
what man is. Here is where a true 

267 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

plan of living should begin ; not at 
the thought of what one does or 
plans to do, but, first of all, at the 
thought of what one is. The Idea 
of Personality should be clear before 
the idea of conduct can be clear. 
Before I can intelligently ask myself, 
"What shall I do?" I ought to 
ask myself : " Who am I ? " " Whence 
am I ? " " What am I? " The lives 
of many would be calmer, broader, 
richer, worthier, if they had known 
themselves better, if they had given 
deeper thought to Personality as the 
great fact that precedes conduct ; 
and the whole level of conduct would 
be raised and dignified if the remem- 
brance of what we are were present 
in what we do. Therefore to pre- 
sent the New Testament Idea of 
Personality is to present thoughts 
that lie close to daily life ; it is not 
to lead into regions of speculative 
philosophy far from the questions 
pressing on us day by day, and from 

268 ' 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

the practical interests that are de- 
manding our attention. It is directly 
to help one to answer those urgent 
life questions and to take hold of 
those practical interests ; it is to 
make better men and women, better 
fathers and mothers, better sons and 
daughters, better husbands and wives, 
better citizens, better leaders and 
teachers of others, better and wiser 
trustees of our own selves. The 
two texts to which reference was 
made at the opening of the chapter, 
are utterances of one and the same 
person ; of the man to whose writ- 
ings we must look for the fullest 
expression of the New Testament 
Idea of Personality. Because both 
utterances are by the same author, 
w r e naturally expect the thought in 
the one to be confirmed and per- 
haps expanded by the thought in 
the other. We find this to be the 
case. St. Paul's fundamental idea 
about human personality recognized 

269 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

the threefold nature of man, — body, 
mind, and spirit ; a physical life with 
its appropriate functions and powers ; 
an intellectual life with its character- 
istic affections and ambitions ; a 
spiritual life with its direct relation- 
ship to the Spirit of God. In the 
quotation from the Athenian speech 
we find at least an implied recog- 
nition of the threefold nature of 
man's personality, as a life lived in 
God : " In Him we live and move 
and have our being." Viewed in 
the light of his other sayings on the 
same subject, this threefold expres- 
sion seems to indicate his belief that 
each realm of our threefold personal- 
ity, — the bodily life, the mental life, 
the spirit life, — is related to God, and 
continues to exist because of its re- 
lation to God. And on the other 
hand, as to God's Life in Man, his 
belief is that God may act directly in 
each realm of mans threefold person- 
ality, for the purpose of making the 

270 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

w/zole man holy, and of preserving the 
whole man intact for the enjoyment of 
a splendid destiny. " May God sanc- 
tify you wholly, and preserve entire 
your spirit and soul and body at the 
coming of the Lord." This is God's 
Life in Man according to the New 
Testament, and as such the writer 
presents it now, with its correspond- 
ing truth of Man's life in God, — as 
one of the conclusions issuing from 
the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice. It 
appears necessary not only that one 
shall apprehend what is the New 
Testament Idea of Personality, but 
that one shall build upon it a distinct 
conception of conduct and destiny. 
To promote this result is the writer's 
objective point. He is not debating 
the truth or the error of the New 
Testament Idea of Personality. He 
is not engaging in controversy with 
others who may have promulgated 
ideas of personality which depart 
from the teachings of the New Tes- 

271 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

tament. He is engaged purely and 
simply in an attempt to report what 
the New Testament Idea is, and in 
urging the acceptance of that idea as 
a working hypothesis in one's own 
thought about one's self. A man 
must think about himself, or live a 
shallow, vacillating life ; he must have 
a theory of who he is, and what he 
is, and whence he is, or be in his con- 
duct like the senseless weather-vane, 
blown this way and that way by any 
wind of passion, prejudice, or pug- 
nacity that happens to be blowing; 
he must have some settled basis of 
self-knowledge on which to stand and 
from which to administer the affairs 
of daily life, or be like a bit of wreck- 
age on the sea of time, tossed to and 
fro, and stranded at last by the fury 
of some wave higher than the rest. 

When one reflects that life is 
hurrying through its earthly expe- 
rience, leaving days, months, and 
years behind as in the foaming 

272 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

wake of some mighty steamship ; 
when one considers what man's temp- 
tations are and what they may yet 
be; when one recalls what helpless- 
ness to resist evil, and what sad and 
sweeping defeat have marked and 
closed the careers of some who have 
lived without any settled and estab- 
lished sense of their own person- 
ality in its relation to God, — well 
may there arise a longing that can- 
not be uttered, to make clear to 
others the bearing upon themselves 
of Man's life in God and God's 
Life in Man. 

" For in Him we live and move 
and have our being." Such, ac- 
cording to the New Testament, is 
Man's life in its relation to God. 
" In Him we live;" that is to say, 
as St. Paul declares in the same 
speech : " He is not far from every 
one of us, and w r e are His off- 
spring." In Him we live. What- 
ever life is, — and no one has yet 

18 273 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

been able to say just what life is, — 
all the biological laboratories in all 
the universities of the world have 
not been able to discover what life 
is, — but whatever it is, life is some- 
thing given, not self-derived. Life 
comes from life ; life comes not 
without pre-existing life. We know 
that we live, although we cannot 
say what life is. And the New 
Testament Idea of life is that in his 
life man touches that Great Life 
outside himself Which was, and is, 
and is to be from all eternity unto 
all eternity. In Him we live ; in 
Him every part of us lives, — body, 
mind, spirit. Let this thought take 
hold of the mind for a moment. 
See to what conclusions it leads; 
see what divineness it brings into 
manhood, into womanhood ; see with 
what sacredness it clothes person- 
ality, until instead of living with only 
a few distant and formal thoughts 
about God, thoughts which really 

274 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

have had little bearing on anything 
done or planned, one finds the 
thought of God brought into every- 
thing, and the most ordinary and 
familiar duties, acts, and relations 
of life suddenly set forth in a new 
and grander light. 

" In Him we live and move and 
have our being." Man has a liv- 
ing body, fearfully and wonderfully 
made; an organism of incalculable 
intricacy and delicacy, wondrous in 
its powers, amazing in its uses; a 
physical creation, which yet is the 
vehicle and organ of all intellectual 
and spiritual expression. To think 
of life, even of the bodily life, as in 
some true and most mysterious way 
an outcome and result of the Life of 
the Infinite God, brings the glory 
of the Divine even into the realm 
of the physical. As Christ, the 
Eternal and Uncreated Son, the 
Word That was before all worlds, 
came into manhood's world, and 

27s 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

dwelt in a body, making it and all 
manhood forever a consecrated thing; 
so we bring even into our physical 
life this august and infinite idea of 
Gods Life as the cause of our own, 
and behold, personality, even ac- 
cording to the flesh, becomes in 
our thought sacred and honorable 
and close to God. 

Man has a thinking mind, an emo- 
tional nature ; imagination, memory, 
powers of intellectual expression. 
Thought is a form of life. The 
functions of the body no more reveal 
life than do the energies of the mind. 
Ah ! how intensely at times we feel 
the throb and rush of the mind's life, 
when we have reached some hour 
of over-mastering recollection, in 
the pain of which the mind quivers 
like a suffering animal ; or some 
hour of eager reasoning, in the 
gladness of which the mind soars 
and poises and darts onward like 
an untamed eagle! Yes, thought 

276 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

is life, — suffering or seraphic life. 
And whence and what is this life 
of the mind ? Where did this most 
marvellous form of vitality find its 
origin ? How shall we account for 
our power to think ? The New 
Testament answers : " In Him we 
live and move and have our being." 
In Him — not far, not far from 
every one of us. Ah ! it is wonder- 
ful. When I think, — even when 
I think unworthily, — I am using a 
power that sprang out of God. 
Thought is the offspring of God. 

Man has a spirit : a part of person- 
ality that responds directly to God ; 
and, if it has life in it, goes forth 
in love to God, desires Him, seeks 
after Him, continually offers itself 
up to Him in the yearning for ho- 
liness. In many the spirit is dead 
because of sin; it lies unconscious 
within the life ; its characteristic 
functions are not found; there is 
no reaching out for God, no com- 

277 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

munion with Him, no longing to 
be like Him : the spirit within the 
man, the woman, is paralyzed ; its 
activities are suspended ; it is death 
in life. But in others there is 
spiritual response; will and purpose 
are going forth toward the Living 
God. How came that spirit to live ? 
By what power was it brought out 
of death into life? Who made it 
able to desire God, to love God, to 
imitate God? The New Testa- 
ment answers : " In Him we live and 
move and have our being." Yes, 
the movement of the human spirit 
is life, life taken directly from con- 
tact with God's Life, as one lights a 
candle from the flame of the altar. 
11 The spirit of man is the candle of 
the Lord." 

We have spoken of Man's life in 
God ; his whole being touching God 
at every moment and at every 
point ; and all human life, its spirit- 
ual energy, its mental force, its bodily 

278 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

potency, an outcome and an effect of 
Divine Power. 

But the New Testament Idea of 
Personality goes farther, and speaks 
of God's Life in us. We are not 
only living in Him insomuch that 
every part of our life depends upon 
Him, but He is living in us with a 
great purpose to make every part of 
our life worthy of Himself now, and 
worthy of its splendid destiny here- 
after. " The God of peace Himself 
sanctify you wholly, and may your 
spirit and soul and body be pre- 
served entire and without blame at 
the coming of our Lord Jesus 
Christ." To speak of Gods Life 
in us is to speak of God's Purpose 
and Will for our personality. And 
what is His Will for us? What 
would He do in us? He would 
sanctify us wholly, and preserve our 
body, mind, and spirit entire and 
without blame at the coming of our 

Lord Jesus Christ. 

279 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

It has already been pointed out that 
the idea of personality should be 
clear before the idea of conduct can 
be clear; that before we can intelli- 
gently ask " What shall I do ? " we 
ought to ask "Who am I?" and 
" What am I ? " for what we do must 
be determined largely by what we 
are. The great determining ques- 
tion of conduct should of course be : 
"Lord, what wilt Thou have me to 
do?" but before one can ask that 
question with full intelligence he 
should ask another, which may be 
called the great determining ques- 
tion of personality : " Lord, what 
wouldst Thou do in me ? " Let us 
be sure that we know what God's 
Life in us is seeking to accomplish, 
and then shall we realize the great- 
ness of our personality in God's sight 
and be the more anxious to put our 
personality entirely into His hands 
and to do whatever He would have 
us to do. So we ask: (C Lord, what 

280 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

wouldst Thou do in me ? " and He an- 
swers: "Sanctify thee wholly, and pre- 
serve thy body and mind and spirit 
entire and without blame at the Lord's 
coming." Not till we have realized all 
this do we know how great our person- 
ality is. God would sanctify and pre- 
serve our bodily life. These physical 
lives of ours mean much to Him. The 
profanation and misuse of them is 
horrible in His sight. The reverent 
and stainless maintenance of them 
is that to which He seeks to lead us 
by dwelling in us. To Him the 
body is a Temple, not of the human 
spirit alone, but of the Holy Spirit, 
the Divine Spirit, God Himself, and 
He would have us regard this part 
of our personality as holy in His sight 
and in our own. This is one great 
message of the Incarnation to such 
as will receive it : the Word made 
flesh glorified the flesh, so that who- 
soever profanes it profanes the Sub- 
stance of Christ's Person. 

281 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

God would sanctify and preserve 
our minds. From the miserable in- 
cubus of intellectual indolence, from 
the ruthless squandering of time on 
vain and vapid fancies, from the poi- 
sonous breath of unhallowed imagina- 
tions, from the petrifying influence of 
selfishness, from the weakness of pride 
and vanity, from the deadly passions 
of hatred and jealousy, from every- 
thing that can impoverish mental 
strength, — God would sanctify and 
preserve our minds. God lives in us 
to make our mental life beautiful, to 
kindle by His mysterious Life-touch 
perceptions of all greatness and lofti- 
ness of thinking, to anoint with wis- 
dom the eyes of our understanding, 
that they may see and choose the best 
in all things. 

God would sanctify and preserve 
our spirits. His Life is in us to 
make for holiness. The power of His 
Spirit bears on us to make us like 

unto Himself. He who made us 

282 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

regenerate, having begotten us again 
unto a living hope through the power 
of Christ's Resurrection, would now 
educate and expand these spirits of 
ours by the constant discipline of 
grace, that we may be worthy of the 
calling with which we are called, and 
may be as light-bearers in the world, 
holding forth the word of life. 

Such appears to be the New 
Testamemt Idea of Personality; 
Man's life in God: " In Him we 
live and move and have our being;" 
God's Life in Man, seeking to sanc- 
tify him wholly, and to preserve 
entire and blameless, for an immortal 
destiny, the threefold life, — body, 
mind, and spirit. 

As we hold up before us this great 
Biblical conception of personality, a 
conception so broad, so comprehen- 
sive, so full of dignity and affection- 
ateness, so perfectly in accord with 
one's highest ideal of what must be 

the Will of God for man, light falls 

283 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

from this theme upon the three great 
thoughts which in our minds lie 
nearest to personality: the thought 
of sin, the thought of redemption, 
the thought of destiny. 

Light falls upon the thought of 
sin as a discordant and abnormal 
fact that has intruded itself into 
our personality; light that reveals 
sin in all its true horror as a grief 
to God and an offence against our 
truest life. Sin is every choice we 
make for ourselves, every thought 
we think, every word we speak, 
every deed we do against the normal 
conditions of our own personality. 
We have seen what those normal 
conditions are, how full of splendor, 
hope, and opportunity — our life 
in God, God's Life in us. Every 
sin is a wounding of God's Life in 
us, a grieving of the Holy Spirit, an 
affront to Him Who is within us, 
because of His mighty love for us. 
Every sin is a blow dealt at one's 

284 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

own personality, — an act of law- 
lessness, a setback to character, a 
defiling and defamation of this most 
holy treasure of our life. 

And again, as we hold up this 
great New Testament conception 
of personality, light falls from it 
upon the thought of Redemption, 
and we are brought to co-ordinate 
the Redemption of man with the 
Creation of man, and to see that 
what was created was also redeemed. 
What w r as created was personality, 
— the threefold unity, — body, mind, 
spirit. What was redeemed was 
personality — the three-fold unity — 
body, mind, spirit. Can any one 
think this thought out to its con- 
elusions and not be thrilled with 
a deeper sense of the sanctity of 
life ? Has Christ indeed suffered 
for my spirit in the anguish of 
His Spirit? Has Christ indeed re- 
deemed my mind in the loneliness 
and humiliation of His own ? Has 

285 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

Christ indeed bathed my body in 
the Mystic Stream that burst from 
His smitten Heart? Oh, wonder of 
wonders ! to be not only a person 
living in God and lived in by God, 
but to be a redeemed person, every 
part of whom, one's physical being, 
one's mental being, one's spiritual 
being, has been taken by Christ, in 
His own Person, up to the altar 
of pain and death, and there conse- 
crated unto newness of life ! 

And finally, when we hold up this 
great New Testament Idea of Per- 
sonality, light falls from it upon the 
thought of Destiny. What is to be 
the Destiny of the redeemed per- 
sonality, when the Will of God con- 
cerning it shall all be accomplished ? 
It is all so precious to us, in the 
persons of those whom we have per- 
fectly known and perfectly loved. 
Body, mind, spirit; these, in our 
dearest, are but one in our thought; 
we cannot separate them. But are 

286 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

they to be separated in their destiny ? 
Is death the eternal rending of per- 
sonality ? Does the grave swallow 
up forever that precious part of per- 
sonality which it receives ? Is there 
no giving back? Is there no resur- 
rection in glory of that which was 
glorious in God's sight once, and in 
ours; that which He sanctified and 
we loved ? Let them who will, be- 
lieve that the body has no destiny 
beyond the intense and abhorrent 
humiliation of the awful grave ; but 
as for me, may my tongue cleave to 
the roof of my mouth, and my right 
hand forget her cunning in the day 
when I cease to believe that He Who 
redeemed and sanctified the whole 
personality — body, mind, and spirit 
— shall at last recover and recon- 
struct in immortal completeness that 
which was rent asunder in Death's 
Catastrophe. By every grave of one 
of Christ's own, still shall I stand, see- 
ing by anticipation there, His own 

287 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

Grave emptied in Resurrection ; by 
every friend sleeping the last mys- 
terious sleep, still shall I dare to say 
that great evangelical prophecy of 
a reconstructed personality : " For 
this corruptible must put on incorrup- 
tion, and this mortal must put on 
immortality; so when this corrupti- 
ble shall have put on incorruption, 
and this mortal shall have put on 
immortality, then shall be brought 
to pass the saying that was written : 
Death is swallowed up in victory." 
What then is the message to the 
individual of this New Testament 
Idea of Personality ? It is this. To 
live day by day as one whose whole 
personality — body, mind, and spirit 

— is knit to the very Life of God ; to 
live as one whose whole personality 

— body, mind, and spirit — is being 
lived in by the Eternal Sanctifier, 
seeking to make one worthy to be 
the living, breathing shrine of God ; 
to live as one whose whole person- 

288 



New Testament Idea of Personality 

ality — body, mind, and spirit — is 
redeemed in Christ for an immortal 
destiny, indestructible by Death, to 
be preserved entire in the hand of 
the All-Loving Keeper, and to be 
presented blameless, joyous, and 
complete at last, at the Coming of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. 



19 289 



XI 

CONDUCT; OR, THE CROWNING 
OF ONESELF 



291 



Whether therefore ye eat or drink, or whatso- 
ever ye do, do all to the glory of God. 

First Epistle to the Corinthians. 

Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man 
take thy crown. 

The Revelation of St. John. 



292 



Chapter XI 

Conduct ; or, The Crowning of 
Oneself 

A scene of extraordinary splendor 
was the coronation of the Czar of 
Russia at Moscow. Possibly in all 
modern history there has not been 
any great function of state more su- 
perbly conceived and executed in 
its material detail. Sailors climbed 
the aerial pinnacles of palace-like 
Churches and wove electric lights 
about them in the meshes of a 
glittering web. The representatives 
of all terrestrial empires, attended 
with suites sumptuously apparelled, 
came travelling from the north, 
the south, the east, the west, con- 
verging on Moscow like the rays of 
a sunburst. The strong rooms of 
the Romanoffs were unlocked, and 

293 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

poured forth a dazzling stream of 
gems : pear-shaped rubies, historic 
diamonds, aquamarines beyond price. 
Cloths of silver, mantles of ermine 
and minever, velvets seeded with 
pearls, jewelled orders, imperial rib- 
bands, troopings of priests and prel- 
ates from afar, chantings of seraphic 
voices, chimings from innumerable 
bells, thunderings from deep-throated 
guns, — such was the coronation of 
the Czar: as a material exhibit of 
sight and sound, the most that 
man can do ! Yet the material opu- 
lence of the occasion was not the 
most impressive feature of the cor- 
onation. Far above all that sur- 
rounded it, towered the moral and 
political significance of a single 
moment and a single act. The mo- 
ment and the act were these — when 
the Czar crowned himself. He 
crowned himself. Standing beneath 
the baldachin of the Cathedral, and 
receiving the crown from the repre- 

294 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

sentative of his religion, he suf- 
fered no fellow-mortal to set that 
crown upon him; but, lifting it 
above himself, with his own hands 
he placed it firmly on his own head. 
The Czar crowned himself; and in 
that single and supreme circum- 
stance lay the significance for good 
or ill, to Russia and to the world, 
of the coronation of Nicholas. He 
declared himself an autocrat, self- 
consecrated under God ; taking the 
symbol of his life sovereignty, as it 
were the direct bestowal of God, 
and appropriating it, without human 
mediation or intervention, directly 
to himself, As his figure flashes 
forth for the moment before the 
world, the figure of a man putting 
a crown upon his own head as the 
sign by which he claims and appro- 
priates a right of living, it gives the 
suggestion of a thought that bears 
nobly and truly on each one of us. 
We may forget the Czar, the auto- 

295 



Conduct; the Crowning of Oneself 

crat, the courtly surroundings, the 
ruling over states, and see only a 
man, standing erect before God, 
taking a God-given Crown, and put- 
ting it with his own hands on his 
own head. We may see only this : 
the Crowning of Oneself. And 
seeing this, we will see the true 
worth, the real royalty of our own 
life ; we will see why St. John the 
Divine, — standing in no cathedral 
made with hands, but standing out 
under the baldachin of the Grecian 
skies on the Lord's day morning 
long ago, and realizing that He on 
Whose Head are many crowns 
meant our life to have its self-coro- 
nation for service, — should have 
cried out in his joy and wonder: " Un- 
to Him That loved us, and washed us 
from our sins in His own Blood, and 
hath made us kings and priests 
unto God and His Father, to Him 
be glory and dominion forever and 
ever. Amen." 

296 



Conduct; the Crowning of Oneself 

The Crowning of Oneself. Let us 
think of it and speak of it. It will 
be remembered that in the preced- 
ing chapter we considered one of 
the conclusions which appear to 
issue from the Gospel of the Divine 
Sacrifice, namely, the New Testa- 
ment Idea of Personality; Man's 
life in God — Gods Life in Man. 
Man's whole life, body, mind, and 
spirit was regarded as subsisting in, 
and directly related to, God's Life, 
so that in Him we live and move 
and have our being ; and God's Life 
was seen to be moving in the whole 
life of man with a purpose to sanc- 
tify it wholly, and to preserve entire 
and without blame, spirit and soul 
and body at the Coming of our Lord 
Jesus Christ. Such was found to be 
the New Testament Idea of Person- 
ality ; our life lived in the enfolding 
atmosphere of the Life of God, and 
God's Life working with love's no- 
blest Purpose in view in each realm of 

297 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

this threefold life of ours. Conduct, 
considered as the crowning of one- 
self, is the supplement and completing 
of the thought of personality. It is 
important to establish in one's mind 
a sense of correlation between the 
two subjects, Personality and Con- 
duct, because they are related, not 
arbitrarily, but organically and of 
necessity. Conduct is the crowning 
of personality. Personality is being. 
Conduct is doing ; which is the cor- 
onation of being with the very glory 
of God. " Whether therefore ye eat 
or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all 
to the glory of God. ,, What we do 
is the coronation of what we are. 
God has given us our personality, — 
a thrice noble, thrice holy thing; a 
thing which lives in all its parts, and 
moves and has its being in Himself ; 
a thing in which through all its several 
parts His Life Power seeks to enter 
and to act unto the sanctifying of 
the whole being. Yes! God has 

298 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

given us our personality, and God, in 
the Divine Sacrifice, has redeemed 
personality. Now, what will we 
do with it as thus redeemed, and 
what will we do by it ? Where- 
withal shall we crown our being 
for its work and influence in life ? 
Stooping down to that which is 
beneath us, shall we pick out of the 
dust, out of the clay of life, the 
stained and withering garland of 
sin's pleasure, and put that upon 
brows that were meant for better 
things — or, standing erect, and con- 
scious of our redemption, before the 
Face of our Father, shall we receive 
from His Hand the royal thought 
of living only unto His Glory, in 
body, mind, and spirit, and shall we 
crown ourselves with that thought? 
Wherewithal shall a redeemed per- 
son be crowned for his life w r ork on 
earth, — with the thorny crown of self- 
indulgence, that makes a mockery 
of our personality, or with the glory- 

299 



Conduct; the Crowning of Oneself 

thought of doing only that which is 
worthy of one who lives in God — 
in whom God lives. 

The crowning of oneself ! What 
an almost terrifying thought is this, 
that we must crown ourselves on 
earth, by conduct ; that conduct is 
the coronation of personality with 
the wreath of dishonor or with the 
circlet of nobleness; and that con- 
duct is what we do and what no 
other can do for us! If in some 
way it could be done for us ; if 
other hands, wiser, gentler, holier 
hands than ours could come and set 
upon our brow the sign that desig- 
nates us for our place in life and our 
influence in the world; if one could 
only be without doing ! If one could 
but abide in the calm, high thought 
of what we are, redeemed in Christ's 
Blood, embraced by the Life of God, 
and born into this world, each to be 
a habitation of God through the 
Spirit ; if one could gloriously sub- 

300 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

sist in the ideal; dwell always on the 
high Transfiguration Mount of that 
superb thought, Man's life in God, 
God's Life in Man ; if the doing of 
deeds were not always pressing 
upon us, resolving the ideal into the 
real, the magnificent abstract into 
the plain and definite concrete, call- 
ing us down from the transfigured 
mount into the difficult, crowded, 
perilous, exhausting plain of acts and 
words! Vainest of dreams ! There 
is no being without doing, — per- 
sonality without conduct is unthink- 
able. And there is no doing for us 
except what w 7 e do in ourselves. 
Conduct is whatsoever we do, — 
everything in every hour of days and 
weeks and months and years, — 
whether we eat or drink or whatso- 
ever we do. Conduct is what we 
claim for ourselves ; the sign we set 
upon our own brows that shows 
where we stand and what we declare 
ourselves to be ; and it is a thought 

301 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

which might well appall one who is 
no coward, that some crown, picked 
from the dust beneath us or taken in 
reverence from the Hand above us, 
we must set on our own heads. 

But our danger is also our dignity. 
Drawn down by temptation, one 
may stoop and pick from the dust 
the crown of shame and sorrow and 
self-mockery, and degrade there- 
with the brow of Personality. That 
is man's danger, that he can do that 
which is far beneath him, that he can 
mock himself, and demean himself 
by conduct unworthy of his high call- 
ing in Christ Jesus ; but in that pos- 
sibility which springs from the very 
construction of his will is also the dig- 
nity of a Child of God redeemed in 
Christ and walking in the Spirit : that 
he can conceive of conduct as the 
crown of glory wherewith one may 
crown oneself ; that he has the power 
to take, from God's offering Hand, 
an idea of conduct great enough to 

302 



.Conduct; the Crowning of Oneself 

comprehend all life, to declare the 
royal dignity of all that one does, 
to set the Kingly Mark on every- 
thing, from the greatest to the least 
item of our daily round. It is with 
intense enthusiasm, with indescrib- 
able interest, one who believes this 
seeks to set forth before the eyes 
of others such a thought; — conduct, 
the crowning of personality ; a doing 
that is worthy of this being \ a doing 
that springs from the remembrance 
of what one is, and that sets upon the 
outward life the sign and affirma- 
tion of its own value in the sight of 
God. The crown does not make 
the king, — the crown set nobly 
on the head is but the affirmation 
of the kingship that is. What we 
do does not make us what we are. 
What we do declares what we are. 
In every phase of action, in the whole 
territory of conduct, it is intended 
that doing shall disclose and affirm 
the quality of being. 

3°3 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

" Whether therefore ye eat or 
drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to 
the glory of God." But we cannot 
understand how " eating and drink- 
ing," and the great multifarious 
" whatsoever'' of life, can be to the 
glory of God. No, we cannot 
understand it when we think only 
of the acts themselves ; considered 
thus, many of them are most un- 
divine, most material, most unim- 
portant acts. But the acts must be 
thought of in relation to the person 
who does them. Conduct acquires 
its meaning and its worth from per- 
sonality. The significance of the 
coronation of Nicholas is not in 
the golden crown considered as an 
object by itself ; it is in the crown 
considered in relation to the person 
on whose head it is placed. It is 
because the Czar is the Czar that 
the crowning of himself becomes 
an act of royal significance. It is 
because we are what we are that 

3°4 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

conduct means so much. Think of 
yourself, remember who you are; 
think of your life in God and God s 
Life in you ; think what has been 
God s Purpose for you always, even 
from out of the eternal past, when, 
in the glorious thought of His 
own Mind, He knew His own In- 
tention and Desire concerning this 
w 7 ondrous human personality that 
was to be in His own Image, knew 
what He would have man to be ; 
think thoughts like these about 
yourself if you would know the 
significance of conduct as the cor- 
onation of personality ; if you would 
know how every act — whether we 
eat or drink or whatsoever we do 

— may be to the glory of God. 
And, that you have the right to 

think such thoughts about your- 
self — nay, that you are bound to 
think such thoughts about yourself 

— is plain to him who, believing 
absolutely the New Testament Idea 

20 3°5 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

of personality, will take that same 
blessed New Testament in his hand 
and will permit the Spirit of God, 
testifying in the Word, to reason 
out for him the New Testament 
logic of conduct as the self-crowning 
of personality. It then appears that 
to make " whatsoever we do " to be 
unto the glory of God does not 
mean to drag into conduct an un- 
real and artificial element of sanc- 
tity, which must inevitably load 
one's life with insincere ceremoni- 
alism ; it means to remember what 
God <£he Father in His eternal Pur- 
pose desires one to be ; it means 
to remember what God the Son by 
His work of Redemption makes 
one to be; it means to remember 
what God the Spirit, by His indwell- 
ing, authorizes one to be. 

It means, to remember what God 
the Father in His eternal Purpose 
desires one to be. Here is where 
foreordination finds its place in our 

306 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

thinking ; not as a grievous yoke of 
fatalism, but as a perfect law of lib- 
erty. New Testament foreordina- 
tion is not necessarily to be regarded 
as the fixing of destiny by a decree ; 
it is also possible to regard it as the 
Purpose, the Desire, the Intention 
in God's Mind for the personality 
He has made in His own Image, — 
God's prophetic coronation of our 
lives, as lives which are united to 
His own ; that, in time, we, becoming 
conscious of His Purpose for us, 
may choose to crown ourselves by 
conduct worthy of the calling with 
which we are called, worthy of the 
royal inheritance our Father has be- 
stowed. " In Him " says St. Paul, 
" we were made a heritage, having 
been foreordained according to the 
Purpose of Him Who worketh all 
things after the counsel of His Will, 
that we should be unto the praise of 
His Glory, we who had before trusted 
in Christ." 

307 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

And then, it is to remember what 
God the Son, by his work of Redemp- 
tion, makes one to be. " To Him 
That loved us, and washed us from 
our sins in His own Blood, and hath 
made us kings and priests unto God 
and His Father, to Him be glory 
forever. For ye are an elect race, 
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, 
a people for God's own possession, 
that ye may show forth the excel* 
lencies of Him who called you out 
of darkness into His marvellous 
light." 

And yet again, it is to remem- 
ber what God the Spirit, by His 
Indwelling, authorizes one to be. 
" Know ye not that your body is the 
Temple of the Holy Ghost, Which 
is in you, Which ye have of God ; 
and ye are not your own, for ye 
are bought with a price; therefore 
glorify God in your body and in 
your spirit, which are God's. " 

Such are the thoughts we have 

308 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

the right to think about ourselves, — 
such the thoughts we are bound to 
think about ourselves if we hold the 
New Testament Idea of Personality. 
And thinking those thoughts, life 
recovers its dignity and conduct, in 
the greatest matters and in the 
smallest ; all action, whether we eat 
or drink, or whatsoever we do, be- 
comes the Crowning of Oneself — the 
acknowledgment with our own hands 
and by our own wills of what we are 
in the Purpose of the Father, in the 
Love of the Son, in the Grace of 
the Spirit. This is a glorious doc- 
trine of conduct. It clothes life with 
new meaning. It sets upon the 
brow a diadem of self-respect. It 
makes one stand erect and look 
upon life as a great privilege to be 
used, a great trust to be adminis- 
tered. There is nothing in this 
doctrine of conduct at variance 
with humility. The publican whom 
Christ blessed above the Pharisee, 

309 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

stood in the Temple and would not 
so much as lift up his eyes unto 
heaven, but smote upon his breast 
and cried, u God be merciful to me 
a sinner." " Not much/' you say, " of 
the kingly in that attitude " " Not 
much," you say, " of the crowning 
of oneself in that smiting of the 
breast." No, there is not. And 
that is what sin does. Sin is the 
unkingly act, sin is the soiling and 
the bartering of our crown. Sin 
bows like a bulrush the head that 
might have been erect, dims with 
scalding tears of shame eyes that 
might have looked into the Eyes 
of God. Sin takes the hands that 
might have lifted our crown to place 
it grandly on our brow, and sets 
them beating sadly and wearily upon 
our breast. But God would not have 
only the beating of the breast and 
the downcast eyes of shame. God 
loves sinners. God helps the sinful. 
But sin and the humiliations of sin 

310 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

were never our destiny, planned in 
the Holy Heart of Eternal Love. 
" He hath chosen us in Him before 
the foundation of the world, that we 
should be holy and without blame 
before Him in love." And if in the 
self-will of the past we have become 
unholy, it is no pleasure to God that 
we should go on beating our breasts 
forever. If the forgiveness of sins 
be not a mockery, if the majestic 
Redemption we commemorate in the 
Sacrament of the Lord's Body and 
Blood be not a fiction, there is a 
lifting up of the bowed head pos- 
sible ; there is a receiving afresh of 
the crown and a putting of it on 
in faith and hope ; there is a look- 
ing once more with clear eyes into 
the Face of God, Who, according to 
His great mercy, has begotten us 
again unto a living hope by the 
Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, 
unto an inheritance incorruptible, 
undefiled, and that fadeth not away. 

311 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

To each life that acknowledges the 

Purpose of the Father, the Atonement 

of the Son, the Potency of the 

Spirit, may it then be said : u Hold 

that fast which thou hast, that no 

man take thy crown." Be kingly 

in your thought and you shall be 

kingly in your deed. Child of a 

Royal Father, remember Whose you 

are and Whom you serve. Kinsman 

of One erst crowned with thorns, 

now crowned with many crowns, 

crown thyself, day by day, by doing 

all unto the glory of God. Let no 

man take thy crown, thy glorious 

crown of a consecrated conduct 

Hold that fast which thou hast; set 

firmly on thine head, as thy royal 

right, the belief that whatsoever 

thou doest has a meaning and a 

value in the sight of God, which 

makes it a glory simply to live one's 

life. Crown thyself until He crown 

thee. Fight the good fight. Keep 

the faith. Finish thy course. Hence- 

312 



Conduct ; the Crowning of Oneself 

forth there is laid up for thee the 
crown of righteousness, which the 
Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give 
thee at that day, — and not to thee 
only, but to all them that have loved 
His Appearing. 



THE END 



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